


A Primer for the Small Weird Loves

by breathechoes (bluedreaming), fingerlick (bluedreaming), kaithartic (bluedreaming)



Series: A Primer for the Small Weird Loves [1]
Category: Chinese Actor RPF, EXO (Band), Red Velvet (K-pop Band), f(x)
Genre: Abuse, Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bears, Child Abuse, Coma, Depression, F/M, Fairy Tale Elements, Gen, Kidnapping, M/M, Magical Realism, Mild Gore, Minor Character Death, Multi, Murder, Other, Physical Abuse, Platonic BDSM, Poison, Self-Harm, Suicide Attempt, Terminal Illnesses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-30
Updated: 2015-07-04
Packaged: 2018-04-06 21:33:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 13
Words: 24,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4237428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluedreaming/pseuds/breathechoes, https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluedreaming/pseuds/fingerlick, https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluedreaming/pseuds/kaithartic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remember what you read in fairy tales? Believe your eyes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Foreword

**Author's Note:**

> _These stories are inspired by fairy tales, the originals, not the Disney adaptations, and the triggers reflect this. No main characters (by this I mean EXO) die in this story, but the physical state of one is questionable. In addition, due to the fairytale-like nature, most side characters (including parents) are one dimensional. Problematic/potentially triggering material will appear abruptly, with no warning._ **Please read at your own risk. The following list is not 100% comprehensive due to the nature of triggers; some may have been overlooked unintentionally. This story does NOT contain any noncon or dubcon AT ALL, OR any underage sex unless explicitly stated.**
> 
>  **Warnings/Triggers:** physical abuse, mental abuse, child abuse, coma (something like it), terminal illness, self-injurious behaviour, attempted suicide, violence, blood, body organs, someone cutting out someone's heart, drowning/water themes, murder of a parent by a child, minor character death on screen and off screen, bdsm-type activity off camera, statutory kidnapping, consensual sex of a minor with an adult, a brother with an older sister obsession, something that isn't legally incest or actually incest but you be the judge. **Although I don't warn for major character death, DO NOT READ THIS STORY IF DEATH IS TRIGGERING TO YOU IN ANY WAY. I can't stress this enough.**
> 
> This story was written with specific songs in mind and a playlist has been provided for best reading. Please see the foreward ([chapter one](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4237428/chapters/9586095)) for more details. Further notes can be found with each chapter.

**Acknowledgements:**

The title of this story is from the poem [A Primer for the Small Weird Loves](http://nightslikerain.tumblr.com/post/121910943023) by Richard Siken. Thanks Reeza!

The chapter titles were taken from the original titles of the stories upon which they are loosely inspired. References can be found linked in the end notes of each chapter, as well as a small personal reflection or comment.

The broad concept of this story was vaguely inspired by Yoko Ogawa's brilliant [Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales](http://wordswithoutborders.org/book-review/yoko-ogawas-revenge%22) and the idea of writing a series of interconnected stories instead of a single linear longfic for this particular challenge was given to me by Reeza. I can't hope to hold a candle to the brilliance of Ogawa's masterful prose and plot intricacies, but this is perhaps, in my own small way, a humble tribute.

**Disclaimer about ages:**

The ages of characters in this story are only very loosely indicated, and each story operates over a different timeline which may or may not be consistent with the other stories, and the internal timeline of each story may be very broad. Generally speaking, you may consider this (the presumed present) to be (vaguely) the summer after graduating from high school, however "this" varies considerably, and might better fit several summers into university, as some characters are very obviously older. In the event that this wandering comment hasn't already indicated, age isn't really the point of this story and there are no real "facts", only approximations. We don't ask how old sleeping beauty was when the prince found her, or how old red riding hood was when she climbed into bed with the wolf, after all. The Brother's Grimm weren't very good about warning either, but killing people, that they did very well indeed.

**Thanks:**

Although the actual narrative of this story was written in a period of about 4(?) days, the bulk of this story was in processing for a very long time, and I owe a lot of thanks to many many people, some of whom I am probably accidentally omitting—it's not intentional!

Thank you Yuki for helping me brainstorm and connect and assign fairy tales, as well as Ange for helping me at the start, Reeza at the end of assignments and Ren for reminding me of East of the Sun, West of the Moon and being so helpful with mood suggestions. (I'm sorry about Rumplestiltskin!) Thank you Adele for always listening to me and just everything and everything. Thank you Reeza for so many music suggestions and Ren for not being afraid to discuss the grittier aspects of fairy tales and everyone for sprinting with me and Kangaroo for being there and propping me up. A huge thank you for wykedpanda for going through my mess of a draft; any inconsistencies/errors etc. and the punctuation are entirely my responsibility. Thank you everyone, and happy birthday S! I hope you have a lovely year ahead of you.

**Notes:**

This story was structured in such a way that no single character's story is told by fewer than two characters, therefore the stories can be read completely out of order, and in fact, the final story's main character's story actually is continued in the penultimate story. For easier navigation, if a story's protagonist's story is continued elsewhere, it has been linked in the end notes of the pertinent chapter. Each character also corresponds to a fairy tale or a character from a fairy tale, however they do not necessarily correspond to the main character and some stories have been significantly changed, or are themselves alternative retellings of that fairy tale. Specific fairy tale notes have been included with each chapter. The first story is acutally concluded in [ a separate story](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3937396) which was written nearly a year ago.

**Soundtrack:**

This story was written with specific songs in mind and a playlist has been provided for best reading. [@AppleMusic](https://itunes.apple.com/ca/playlist/primer-for-small-weird-loves/idpl.f1cc77c7d5374bfa94ec53ca8ee1d5c4) [Spotify](http://open.spotify.com/user/nightmenagerie/playlist/3uI9lf3qSjy1ZjxPUeZYLu).

**Complete Tracklist:**  
in order of chapter

1\. [Der Gevatter Tod (Lu Han)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4237428/chapters/9664569) S. Carey - We Fell (Alt. Version) [Spotify](http://open.spotify.com/track/59ctK71hBhIApfsINuy0WB) [YouTube](http://youtu.be/h510Qc3CefA)  
2\. [The Tell-Tale Heart (Zitao)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4237428/chapters/9664974) Jo Noon - Reason [Spotify](http://open.spotify.com/track/6b2hLmVSpG99dxeqdMe0p9) [SoundCloud](https://soundcloud.com/skjnirecords/jo-noon-reason-original-mix)  
3\. [De røde sko (Jongin)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4237428/chapters/9664998) Nils Frahm - Four Hands [Spotify](http://open.spotify.com/track/09SHYBLaWxZUbmRhxWiez1) [BeatPort](https://pro.beatport.com/track/four-hands-original-mix/6512916)  
4\. [Rumpelstilzchen (Kyungsoo)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4237428/chapters/9665013) ATTLAS - Kayla [Spotify](http://open.spotify.com/track/49YmMPgmH33K57siyzW2rB) [SoundCloud](https://soundcloud.com/mau5trap/attlas-kayla-1)  
5\. [Rattenfänger von Hameln (Minseok)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4237428/chapters/9665331) Ed Sheeran - I See Fire [Spotify](http://open.spotify.com/track/5pY3ovFxbvAg7reGZjJQSp) [YouTube](http://youtu.be/mllXxyHTzfg)  
6\. [Von dem Machandelboom (Yixing)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4237428/chapters/9665346) Gossip - Casualties of War [Spotify](http://open.spotify.com/track/7MfbsOrUbCMbQhKyo9avqF) [YouTube](http://youtu.be/HiSQ-ZUVpoY)  
7\. [Snedronningen (Junmyeon)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4237428/chapters/9665367) Sia - Breathe Me [Spotify](http://open.spotify.com/track/6hrgeEo1WQOHVeF8QMv68S) [YouTube](http://youtu.be/ghPcYqn0p4Y)  
8\. [Hänsel und Gretel (Chanyeol)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4237428/chapters/9665424) Kodaline - One Day [Spotify](http://open.spotify.com/track/41Tfjvjuw8s61okfqPOV1Z) [YouTube](http://youtu.be/LE7KVkm_YFU)  
9\. [Kong Lindorm (Baekhyun)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4237428/chapters/9665448) Simon Curtis - Flesh [Spotify](http://open.spotify.com/track/0kW7NQraFEyAhXqaE4cZG0) [YouTube](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEfKooMunLI)  
10\. [La Belle au bois dormant (Jongdae)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4237428/chapters/9665484) Placebo - A Million Little Pieces [Spotify](http://open.spotify.com/track/19pQaJUSEtn31fpO6RozaH) [YouTube](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0YP9aJ_1TQ)  
11\. [Cenerentola (Yifan)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4237428/chapters/9665517) Annie Lennox - Love Song for a Vampire [Spotify](http://open.spotify.com/track/586ebYARm6m2wTjUYfnt16) [YouTube](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhG8zC4npsE)  
12\. [Østenfor sol og vestenfor måne (Sehun)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4237428/chapters/9665532) Elsa & Emilie - Endless Optimism [Spotify](http://open.spotify.com/track/4GAASor2AiPvM3Wl05dkKf) [YouTube](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsQDVW70Nzk)


	2. Der Gevatter Tod {Lu Han}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"You have betrayed me. I will overlook it this time because you are my godson, but if you dare to do it again, it will cost you your neck, for I will take you yourself away with me."_ — Death [†](http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm044.html)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was written with S. Carey's We Fell (Alt. Version) ([Spotify](http://open.spotify.com/track/59ctK71hBhIApfsINuy0WB) [YouTube](http://youtu.be/h510Qc3CefA)) in mind.
> 
>   _I'm not really doing individual warnings but this story contains some mild gore._

Lu Han likes the number seven. Seven small scoops of cereal in his breakfast bowl, seven seconds of milk poured out of the carton. Seven steps to the coffee machine. Lu Han sits down at the table with his cereal and milk and coffee and doesn't think about anything at all.

It's more than seven steps to the grocery story, Lu Han doesn't count but rather watches the people walking past, faces he knows and face he doesn't and the shadows that walk behind them. Some of them, like the one following the little boy that has just asked his mother for an ice cream cone because the ice cream truck song is streaming through the trees ahead, are far in the distance; this boy's shadow is only peering around the corner half a block away. Others, like the man sitting on the bench and waiting for the bus, are hovering just behind, invisible air breathing over necks. The man brings a hand up to brush at his neck, an absent-minded expression, perfectly innocent. The shadow shifts away, just a bit, lost in the dapples of the light filtering between the leaves.

And then there are the shadows, like the one belonging to the little girl riding her tricycle, stopped at a red light, that are so much closer than they should be. The girl smiles up at Lu Han as he walks by, the other pedestrian light counting down to red. She has a pink ribbon in her hair. Before her light changes, Lu Han steps sideways, just a bit, and blocks the shadow from view, obstructing it with his body.

He's not really sure if he's supposed to do this, but sometimes he does anyway. Standing there, between the girl and her shadow, Lu Han watches as it flickers and then fades from view. It's not gone, but it won't be close again for a long time. The light changes, and the girl pedals off on her tricycle, her mother stepping out of the house across the street to wave at her from the front step. Lu Han keeps walking.

He picks out the seventh carton of milk and the seventh kind of cereal. They're all the same anyway. Locking eyes with the student at the cash register, Lu Han nods. _Kyungsoo_ , his name tag reads. Kyungsoo's eyes go dark sometimes; Lu Han just smiles at him and hands him the exact change and keeps going.

He wonders if Kyungsoo can see his shadow. Lu Han stands in front of the mirror at his house, getting dressed for a dance performance at the concert hall that most of the town will turn out for, and tries to look for his shadow in the mirror, not for the first time. He can't find it. But whether it's so far away that it's out of sight, or so close that it's glued to his back, Lu Han doesn't know.

There's a boy, standing in the lobby of the concert hall, leaning on crutches. The shadow behind him is swooping up over his rumpled hair, fingers streaming out in the faint wind of people moving, walking, crowding around the boy who stands in the middle of the floor in silence. Lu Han wanders in front of his shadow, curious. He doesn't usually see shadows that act like this.

The shadow almost has a face, and Lu Han is startled, staring into the dark before it slowly fades from sight. He shakes his head to clear it, takes seven steps to the left. The boy moves, abruptly, turning towards the main doors and heading out into the night, his crutches making no sound as they fall first on carpet before they're too far away to hear. Somehow, the thought crosses Lu Han's mind that perhaps he's looking for his shadow. He shrugs; it's gone anyway.

The performance is a ballet in seven acts, and Lu Han applauds the dancers on stage for their hard work as they weave in between the dancers they can see and the shadows they can't.

The lost boy's shadow isn't gone. Lu Han goes to the library; he likes the library, it's quiet and he can sit and read books, watch the leaves scrape against the glass windowpanes of the second floor reading room, ignore the shadows standing between the shelves as their people lose themselves in different worlds. But the boy, sitting curled into a window seat, heavy botany book tucked into his lap, crutches lying in a careless heap on the floor next to the wall, is almost hidden from view by his shadow.

Lu Han is puzzled, standing up with a scraping sound as his chair moves across the parquet. There's no excuse, not this time, but he walks towards the boy anyway, who probably thinks that Lu Han is just heading for the magazine rack, a few metres away, except Lu Han doesn't veer off, instead slipping past the shadow to stand and look out the window.

He can feel the shadow against his back, not touching because it's not corporal, but the shadow is so real it's odd. Lu Han watches the street outside the window for a moment, an ice cream truck driving slowly by, children following in its wake. He knows the boy is looking at him, but Lu Han doesn't say anything, and leaves as soon as he can feel the shadow is gone.

It comes back. Seven days later, Lu Han is sitting at a table in the library, flipping through Dante's _Purgatorio_ , when there's a rhythmic tapping, like a kind of stilted dance, and the boy comes up the stairs on his crutches. The shadow is back, hovering behind him, but it looks up a Lu Han; even faceless he can read its expression. _I dare you._

Lu Han dares. Letting the book fall shut on the table, he slips out of his seat and walks deliberately towards the boy, pausing to stare through the shadow and down the steps to the first floor of the library that slowly swims into view as the shadow fades. Watching the boy move across the reading room, a book on local plants tucked under his arm, Lu Han wonders what's wrong with him.

He's out of milk again, and bread too. They have five croissants left in the bin at the bakery in the grocery story, but that's okay, five is a good number too. Lu Han smiles at the girl with the pink ribbon, her hair is done up in braids today and she's skipping along the candy section, evading her mother. Kyungsoo is at the cash register again, and Lu Han smiles while Kyungsoo seems intent on trying to get the bar code reader to read everything right on the first try. It's nice, silence.

Lu Han walks home, a white plastic shopping bag swinging from each hand, counting his steps in sevens while the breeze swirls overhead, carrying whispers of changing weather with it. The boy is sitting on the curb, and the shadow is almost crouched over him where he slumps at the edge of the road, crutches tangled in the long grass beside the sidewalk.

Lu Han isn't annoyed, not really, but he finally thinks he understands. Setting his grocery bags carefully down on the grass, making sure that the milk carton is right side up, he marches over to the shadow and slides in between it and the boy. He has to lean over a little, and it's more than a bit strange, locking eyes with the boy who looks up at him with a helpless question in his eyes.

"Stop trying to kill yourself," Lu Han says, and waits there, staring into the boy's face until he can feel the shadow dissipate. There's nothing else he can do. Gathering up his milk and bread, he walks home. His footsteps don't come out to a multiple of seven.

Lu Han tries walking a different way, he's not sure if it's because he doesn't want to know what will happen to the boy with a death wish, or if he does. This way leads by the hospital, the lush foliage of the trees casting the sidewalk in a dim green light that makes the shadows hard to pick out, so that Lu Han almost misses him.

It's not the boy with crutches.

This boy is sitting in a wheelchair, and he's obviously from the hospital, judging by his gown and bare feet. Lu Han isn't sure whether that's quite allowed, but it probably doesn't matter, because this boy has the closest shadow Lu Han has ever seen. In fact, the boy should be dead, with the way his shadow is coiled up around him, and there's no way that Lu Han can get between the shadow and the boy at all.

And that's when he realizes that he wants to.

"What's your name?" Lu Han asks, without quite meaning to, but he doesn't regret it. The boy, not a boy, not really, looks up at him with thickly-lashed eyes and replies.

"Zitao." Lu Han looks at the shadow coiled around Zitao and keeps expecting him to drop dead any moment, but he's still breathing.

"Do you want to come home with me?" he asks Zitao, he isn't even quite sure why, but Zitao nods.

Zitao sleeps in the guest room and Lu Han checks on him in the morning and he isn't dead. Lu Han is too glad to analyze his behaviour. He makes Zitao pancakes and Zitao laughs and Lu Han gives him something to wear that isn't a hospital gown.

By day seven they're sleeping in the same bed, Lu Han curled around the younger man who's taller but shrinks so small in the sheets. Lu Han keeps expecting to wake up curled around a corpse, but every morning that Zitao smiles sleepily at him from between the sheets feels like a miracle. It's too good to last.

It doesn't last. One morning, seven days or seventeen days or seventy seven days later, Lu Han has long stopped counting, only tracing the life lines on ZItao's palms as he hums him to sleep, Lu Han wakes up but Zitao doesn't.

At first he thinks that Zitao is dead, the dark shadow curled so closely around him that it's like a second skin. But then Lu Han realizes that Zitao's heart is still beating. He can hear it, when he presses his ear to Zitao's chest. Looking more closely, Lu Han can see shadowy fingers creeping around Zitao's ribs, long incorporeal fingers digging into his chest, reaching for his heart. Not for the first time, Lu Han tries to squeeze in between Zitao and his shadow, but it just doesn't work.

There isn't enough space.

Lu Han doesn't know what to do; Zitao's heart is still beating, but the shadowy fingers are going deeper and deeper, reaching for his heart, and somehow he knows that once they reach it, the heart will stop beating. It's like watching a death in slow motion.

It's a bad idea, but Lu Han doesn't care, darting to one of the rooms in his house that he doesn't open, his father's office, a place he's only briefly surveyed, the earthly belongings of a man whom Lu Han has no recollection of. But he remembers the bone saw, because his father was a surgeon, and liked to take his work home. Lu Han hasn't ever really wondered, and he doesn't now, snatching the blade from the wall, along with a scalpel that still looks sharp enough to part skin.

The fingers are deep down, when Lu Han returns, but Zitao's heart is still beating. Lu Han doesn't take the time to worry about it, he just starts cutting, and it's as messy as he thought it would be and yet it doesn't matter, because he's racing the shadow to the goal, and he has to go through ribs.

Reaching in to pull the still-beating heart out with red hands, Lu Han can feel it beating in his hands, _thump thump, thump thump, thump thump thump_. As soon as he's lifted it away from Zitao's body, there's a sudden rush of something that isn't wind as the shadow is sucked into the jagged hole where the heart was, the last lingering fingers pulling the gaping ribs shut like a door behind them as the shadow stitches Zitao's chest back up and disappears with a faded white scar, leaving the heart beating in Lu Han's hands.

 _I love you,_ the heart seems to be saying, between beats. Lu Han tucks it into a soft leather bag, and carries it with him. In the bed, the rest of Zitao sleeps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was loosely inspired by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's [Godfather Death](http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm044.html). It is also in some ways flavoured by [Mōryō no Hako](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C5%8Dry%C5%8D_no_Hako) by Natsuhiko Kyogoku.
> 
> The continuation of this story can be read [here](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Shiritori/works/3937396), as a part of the [A Primer for the Small Weird Loves](http://archiveofourown.org/series/282309) series.
> 
>   _I actually wrote a fanfiction for this story itself as a child, before I knew that fanfiction was a thing. Death in this story has always fascinated me, but I found the protagonist whiny and annoying, so this was my attempt to spin it out in a different direction._


	3. The Tell-Tale Heart  {Zitao}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _". . .dissemble no more! I admit the deed! --tear up the planks! here, here! --It is the beating of his hideous heart!"_ — Unnamed Protagonist [†](http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/POE/telltale.html)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was written with Jo Noon's Reason ([Spotify](http://open.spotify.com/track/6b2hLmVSpG99dxeqdMe0p9) [SoundCloud](https://soundcloud.com/skjnirecords/jo-noon-reason-original-mix)) in mind.

Zitao knows that he's going to die young. It is just what it is. When other kids were imagining what they wanted to be when they grew up, Zitao was thinking about where he wanted to be buried.

It's okay, really. It's just the way things are.

Sometimes he wonders. . .what it would be like to have a whole life stretched out in front of you. Is it like standing at the top of a mountain, eyes straining for the horizon, so much valley stretched out below you that you don't even know where to begin? He can feel his heart beating too quickly in his chest at the thought, it's almost painful.

It is painful. He goes back to sitting at the window and looking out, watching the children play in the sun. He could go outside, his mother asks if he doesn't want to play with the other kids, but somehow Zitao finds that he doesn't. It's like watching a parade file by, marching band and clowns and children screaming; someone else's life multiplied on and on, a river he'll never dip his feet in.

He smiles anyway.

It's his parents that seem to suffer more than him, Zitao watches their strained smiles after they talk to yet another doctor, the reassurances they layer on him during the drive home, the words ringing false in the heavy air of the car. He can feel his heart skip.

"You'll be okay, honey," his mother says, brown liquid eyes looking at him from the rearview mirror of the car. She's lying.

Zitao goes up to his room and sits on his bed and looks at pictures of animals, exotic creatures in far away lands that he'll never be able to visit. It doesn't bother him; the pictures are pretty and he feels happy admiring the curious okapi and the cute platypus.

They start with the operations and he moves to the hospital. His father reassures him that it's just temporary, they'll be bringing him home as soon as he's better, but he can see the look the nurse is giving him, the way her eyes flick to the door. _I won't be going home,_ he realizes, and the thought makes him a little sad, not so much the fact that he's graduated to a new stage in dying, but that they didn't even let him say goodbye.

"You can be honest with me," he tells the nurse, _Song Qian_ her name tag says. She looks at him, consideringly and then smiles and nods.

Sometimes Zitao wishes they would just stop trying to save his life. "I'm dying anyway," he tells Qian, who flicks him on the forehead.

"It's not for you," she says, and her voice is a little sad. Zitao wonders how many people she's seen die. "It's for your parents." She pats him on the head before wheeling the cart out of the room.

Zitao thinks about what she said, and it's true. His parents are clinging to the hope that he'll get better, and even though he knows he won't, he can try to pretend, for their sakes. Smiling is a good thing, anyway.

He smiles and tells them he feels great, and Qian lets them take him out to the park, even though he knows he's not really up for it. It's okay. It's for them anyway.

There are so many kids in the park, Zitao feels so young and yet he remembers he's not really a kid anymore. It's strange, dying in slow motion.

"Do you want ice cream?" his mom asks, and there's a hopeful expression on her face. He nods, even though he's not really hungry, and she gives him the money. "Do you want me to wheel you?" she asks. Zitao thinks for a bit, but he can probably manage the wheelchair today, and it's nice to do something for himself.

There's a long line winding in front of the ice cream truck—kids and adults too, all clutching their coins or wallets. Up ahead, Zitao can see the people at the window, lifting up their money in offering, and coming away with smiles and ice cream. _Does ice cream make people that happy?_ He's curious to find out, he can't remember having ever gotten ice cream from an ice cream truck before. Maybe the ice cream is really really good.

The ice cream vendor isn't as old as Zitao thought, when he wheels slowly up to the window. He might even be Zitao's age; it's hard to tell. _I wonder what it would be like, to live?_ Zitao thinks, as he hands up his money. Their eyes lock.

The young man's eyes are dark, deep, and Zitao can see his death reflected in them. _Smoke, and fire, and quiet._

It's almost comforting, he knows he's dying, he was born dying, and yet it's terrifying. People aren't supposed to see themselves die.

The vendor hands him the cone, white vanilla ice cream heaped high like a small mountain, and it slips out of Zitao's fingers as he pulls his hand back, breaking eye contact with the vendor and wheeling away.

"Where's your ice cream?" his mother asks when he pulls up next to her. There's a line of sweat under his fringe, and his heart is pounding. He shouldn't have moved so quickly.

"They didn't have the flavour I want," Zitao lies, "so I gave my money to a kid who dropped theirs." He feels bad, not lying to his mother, because she lies to him all the time, but about the imaginary kid who didn't drop their ice cream but who Zitao didn't give the money to anyway.

His mother doesn't come as often after that, and Zitao just sits by the window and watches the street outside. The ice cream truck comes by often, a crowd of children usually following the tinny music coming from its ancient speakers. Zitao wonders if the ice cream is sweet, if they don't see their deaths reflected in the vendor's eyes.

Qian is a really nice nurse, but she draws lines at some things like solo expeditions, especially on days when Zitao's lips are too thin and it feels like his heart is hitting his rib cage, trying to get out. _Maybe the problem was always that my heart was never supposed to be in my body,_ Zitao thinks sometimes, as he glares at Qian who only smiles, ruffling his hair and wheeling him firmly back to his room. The night nurse though, Seulgi, is a lot more lax. Zitao knows that he might end up getting her in trouble one day, but sometimes he needs to be a little selfish.

Zitao lies in his bed at night and thinks about the fact that his parents haven't come to see him in two weeks. It feels like they're finally letting go, and it hurts. He's so used to lying to make them happy, by now, that it feels strange to be honest. They've been fighting to keep him for so long, even though it was a hopeless fight, and made Zitao sad, but now that they've stopped, he kind of wishes that they wouldn't just let him go.

The sheets are cold and his heart whistles in his chest, blood slipping through veins, sliding along arteries, pooling and pumping and whispering as it traces through every cell in his body. Zitao sits up, and slips into his wheelchair, giving Seulgi a meaningful glance before he wheels out the door.

The night air is cool on his face, leaves brushing against each other in the wind and whispering secrets he can't understand. Zitao is wheeling along the empty sidewalk, looking up at the stars, when he spots a vending machine on the next street. There aren't any cars, so he slips down the curb and ends up in front of the illuminated display, craning his neck to read the flavours, when he realizes that he doesn't have any money. He's just about to head back, strangely disappointed, when he notices something odd.

The red numbers say _1.00_.

Someone has left a dollar in the machine, and he can buy an ice cream anyway. He presses vanilla. _I never got to try the other ice cream._ Zitao can't remember ever having ice cream from a machine either, so when the vanilla ice cream, a cone wrapped in brightly coloured paper, drops into the pick up slot, he can feel his heart pulsing gently in his throat in anticipation. Wheeling back across the street, he can't wait and starts peeling back the wrapper when he sees—

the young man from the ice cream truck. He's not alone though, there's another young man with him. A young man who looks lost, eyes wide, a fine tremble emanating from his body as the ice cream vendor pulls him along. Zitao is somehow terrified, the ice cream slipping out of his fingers as he desperately wheels himself away.

He doesn't even know why.

When he gets back to the hospital, slipping in the side door, Seulgi isn't in sight and Zitao is glad because he's having trouble breathing, his lips are tingling and he drags himself out of his chair and into bed. It feels like his heart is trying to tear itself out of his chest, and somehow Zitao knows that it's the beginning of the end.

Knowing you're going to die is different than dying.

Zitao is almost surprised to open his eyes in the morning, hear Qian's distinctive footsteps in the hallway, watch the green of the leaves moving like a strange kaleidoscope outside his window. He feels alive, somehow, and nods at Qian down the hall before wheeling out. He has a suspicion that if she gets a chance to look at him properly, he won't' be allowed to leave.

Zitao goes outside every day after that, feels the air on his face, the wind ruffling his hair. He makes sure to avoid the ice cream truck, and he doesn't see the ice cream vendor after that, but one day a flyer catches his eye, a missing person's poster, and on it is the face of the lost boy.

Zitao nods, and keeps going.

One morning, as he's sitting under a tree next to the sidewalk, it's a hot day but the sun trickling between the dappled shade of the leaves is nice on his face, a young man walks by. It's hard to tell how old he is, he doesn't look old and yet—

he stops in front of Zitao in his wheelchair.

"What's your name?" he asks. His voice is soft, curious, and there's something else.

"Zitao," Zitao replies without thinking, but it's okay.

The young man looks at him; Zitao can feel his eyes tracing the folds of his eyelids, lingering on the grooves of his collarbones. "Do you want to come home with me?" He looks surprised then, like he can't quite believe he asked.

Zitao nods. There's something about the stranger that feels right. Like remembering, not forgetting. He doesn't think about his parents at all as the young man wheels him away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is very loosely inspired (very loosely!) by [The Tell-Tale Heart ](http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/POE/telltale.html)by Edgar Allan Poe.
> 
> The continuation of this story can be read in [chapter two](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4237428/chapters/9664569).
> 
> _I've always loved this story, the idea of the still beating heart has lingered with me for a long time._


	4. De røde sko {Jongin}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _". . .dance in your red shoes till you are pale and cold, till your skin shrivels up and you are a skeleton!"_ — an Angel [†](http://hca.gilead.org.il/red_shoe.html)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was written with Nils Frahm's Four Hands ([Spotify](http://open.spotify.com/track/09SHYBLaWxZUbmRhxWiez1) [BeatPort](https://pro.beatport.com/track/four-hands-original-mix/6512916)) in mind.

Jongin has always lived for dance. He breathes it, the burn, the stretch, the way his arms aren't his arms, his legs aren't his legs, he isn't himself, Jongin, but rather an expression of something else.

_When I dance,_ he always thinks, _I'm the dance._

Jongin isn't interested in anything that isn't dancing. When his parents and sisters try to interest him in different things, he turns away. Even his best friend, Taemin, can't compete.

When they're up against each other for the lead role at the end of high school and Taemin wins, Jongin doesn't cry, even though everyone is looking at him strangely. He just turns and walks away, slinging his bag over his shoulder, and disappears into a practice room.

He doesn't come out until he's finished, countless hours later, and he doesn't answer Taemin's calls after that, or talk to him, instead turning and heading the other way. Jongin isn't angry with Taemin though, he's angry with the dance for letting him down.

He only dances harder, practices longer, reaches further. His parents tell him to take a break, but he doesn't hear them. His sisters come home from university to try to talk to him, but he leaves for the studio. His phone has a list of missed messages spanning years.

Jongin doesn't care. He only cares about dancing.

His ankle has been bothering him for a while; he's not really sure when it began. Lost in the small quotidian pains—tired feet, heavy limbs, bruises and scrapes and other things that don't matter, not really, not if he has any choice in the matter—it's hard to trace when it began.

The dance instructor, Boa, tells him to stop, that he needs a break.

Jongin ignores her. He's so so close, and the tryouts are barely a stretch away. He dances harder than ever, wrapping his ankle and spraying it with cooling spray; he's been gritting his teeth against everything for so long that it doesn't make any difference, not really. Jongin is good at keeping his focus narrow. There's only dance, no Jongin, not anything else. Just dance. He keeps practicing.

Until he can't. His ankle has been on fire for the last while, a burning that can't be quenched, but Jongin only takes the pain and eats it up, funnels it into a higher jump, a longer stretch, a deeper bow. His ankle wobbles and he breathes through it, channels it into movement.

It lets him down. He lowers his leg to a ground, a step before a leap, but he just keeps sinking to the ground as his leg folds up beneath him in a huge stab of pain as something snaps. Jongin doesn't scream though. He just feels numb, as they take him away.

This isn't happening.

Except it is happening, and when Jongin wakes up in the hospital after surgery, a wheelchair beside his bed and crutches leaning against the wall, he knows that the dance has abandoned him, left him to rot in the quiet, dark stillness.

Taemin is going to dance the part Jongin wanted. Jongin hears this, his mother looking at him anxiously but his face betrays no expression. It doesn't matter. Taemin sends him a message, but Jongin doesn't open it. He never has before.

They don't let him go home for too long, physiotherapy and other things he ignores before they finally send him home from the hospital on crutches and Jongin's mom hands him tickets to the performance tonight, "Just in case you want to go, dear." She sounds lost, like she doesn't know what to do to help, but there's nothing she can do. Everything is over.

Jongin gets dressed for the performance, stopping by his medicine cabinet to take the painkillers the doctor sent home with him. He takes the whole bottle, swallowing the pills down in a single gulp of clear water before slipping into his shoes and awkwardly navigating on his crutches out the door.

Standing in the lobby, waiting for the doors to open, he spots a strange face. A young man, and yet Jongin can't quite tell how old he is, though he isn't really used to looking at people. He's always been dancing.

The stranger stands in front of him, looking at him like he can see through Jongin to his very skeleton, and Jongin isn't sure whether he's flattered or disturbed. The expression on the young man's face doesn't change, but his eyes seem to flicker, as though there are things moving in the lobby that Jongin can't see. It feels like someone has taken a weight off his back, a weight that he didn't know he had, and Jongin doesn't like it, a feeling like he's going to drift away any moment, fly off with nothing, not even dance to anchor him. The doors open but Jongin turns away and heads out the door.

Jongin goes to sleep, wakes up, and he's still there. It's almost enraging. 

He tells his mother he's going to the library, just for an excuse to leave the house, but when he's hobbling down the sidewalk he ends up heading for the red brick building anyway, the leaves overhead taunting him, whispers secrets into the wind that echo too loudly in his ears. _Jongin can't dance anymore. Jongin is nothing anymore._

There's a book on display, wood plants and mushrooms, and Jongin thinks about the things that look so pretty but hold death in their small insides. The destroying angel is easy enough to find, almost easier than the edible mushrooms that Jongin knows fill the woods.

He's rustling through the underbrush when he sees something—a white flash of fur, perhaps, and then he looks closer. The shape of a bear stands out against the green leaves for a moment, before it's gone. A polar bear. It's strange. _I wonder what it would be like to be eaten by a bear_ , Jongin thinks, but the bear doesn't come back. He finds the destroying angels and tears the white things up with his hands, stuffing them into his mouth and chewing. They don't taste like death.

He waits in the library the next day, curled up in the window seat, brown twigs from the tree outside scratching against the glass like skeletal fingers. _See you soon,_ they seem to be saying, but Jongin sees the stranger again instead, walking over from a spot at a table, and the young man stops beside him instead of continuing on towards the magazine rack. Jongin waits for him to speak, but there's only silence, as he stares out the window at the tree blowing in the summer wind, before turning and leaving.

Jongin doesn't know what to think, and when several days pass he goes out to the woods and collects death caps instead. They don't taste any different, but Jongin heads to the library to check. Death caps are supposed to be faster, he seems to remember reading, lines of black text on white paper, blinking away the memories of a wood barre and the mirror reflecting the line of his back and leg.

The stranger is in the library again, and there's something about the expression on his face—he looks frustrated, but he's not looking at Jongin, rather something else. The young man walks up, and Jongin pauses, waiting for a question that never comes, when the stranger pauses for a moment at the top of the steps before descending to the main foyer.

Jongin doesn't know his name, or he would shout after the the stranger to ask him what on earth is going on.

When he goes home, his mother smiles at him over the dinner table and asks how he's doing. Jongin lets his fork fall with a clatter against the porcelain plate and leaves the table, forgetting for a moment that he needs crutches and catching himself angrily on the edge of the table with an elbow before he fumbles for the offending items, brushing away his father's hand outstretched in an offer of help.

The stairs feel taller today than usual, and when he falls into bed he thinks about not getting out of it again.

In the morning, Jongin waits until his mother leaves for work and then clumps into her bathroom to take all her pills, stuffing them in dry mouthfuls into his mouth, dipping down to drink from the faucet, drowning the pills in a torrent of water that doesn't stop them from burning as they catch in his throat, sticking on the way down. He feels sick, his stomach swimming, and he's afraid he'll throw up so he takes a deep breath, as if he's channeling the pain into dance except there is no dance, only two clumsy crutches that slip over the carpet as he slides down the steps and trips out the front door.

Jongin isn't sure where he's headed today, not the forest, even though the thought of the white bear is tempting, but it seems so far, and the library too, as he looks down the long stretch of sidewalk before sinking onto the curb, letting his crutches fall in a table of grass at the side of the road. The day is a little fuzzy around the edges, as Jongin blinks.

Feet appear on the ground before him, and he looks up. It's the stranger again, and this time he opens his mouth.

"Stop trying to kill yourself," he says, and this time he stares Jongin straight in the face. Jongin can't blink, can't breathe, until the stranger sighs, some kind of tension disappearing and it's strange, but the air feels lighter around Jongin too, the day a little brighter as he watches the young man walk a few steps to where two white plastic shopping bags are sitting on the grass, picking one up in each hand by the handle before he straightens and continues around the corner.

Jongin sits there for a while. There's a bird singing in the tree above him, and the sun dances across the back of his neck. Finally he stands up, pulling himself up on his crutches, and heads home. He feels, somehow, like Jongin.

His phone buzzes in his pocket, another message from Taemin. This time he opens it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was very loosely inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's [The Red Shoes](http://hca.gilead.org.il/red_shoe.html).
> 
> _Read the story and thank me for not sticking to the canon._


	5. Rumpelstilzchen {Kyungsoo}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"I have nothing more that I could give you."_ — the girl [†](http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm055.html)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was written with ATTLAS' Kayla ([Spotify](http://open.spotify.com/track/49YmMPgmH33K57siyzW2rB) [SoundCloud](https://soundcloud.com/mau5trap/attlas-kayla-1)) in mind.

Kyungsoo doesn't have any parents, not ones that he remembers anyway. He's always lived with his grandmother, a strange woman who won't touch his hands. She holds a lot of other hands though, people who come to her and ask to have their futures told, as she looks with her fingers, skin tiptoeing over skin, the lines in stranger's palms that she can't see, cloudy cataracts obscuring her eyes and rendering her effectively blind. It doesn't matter. She sees more than she should with her hands anyway.

Kyungsoo isn't sad when she dies, not really. She never touched him, and barely spoke. The house, with her absence, is no different than the house with her presence. He's always preferred the forest anyway. He has a friend there, a white polar bear, as out of place in the deciduous forest as Kyungsoo sometimes feels. He can see, right from the start, that the bear is actually a boy, and they get along splendidly, the lonely boy and the bear who can't speak, romping silently in the woods, as the bear shows Kyungsoo his favourite spots, and Kyungsoo speaks to him, sometimes, about the things he's seen in the town. The bear likes that, especially the stories about other children, so Kyungsoo makes it a habit to notice things like that, pay attention to the other people around him.

When the bear slides through the trees to find him one day, crouched next to a pool of water, watching the tiny tadpoles darting about in the clear stillness with only tiny ripples announcing their movements, Kyungsoo can see the bear's pain in not being able to interact with other children his age. The bear leads Kyungsoo to a small hollow where there are two children, lost and calling for their parents. Kyungsoo nods to the bear in thanks, but he's already slipped away into the shadows.

"Are you lost?" Kyungsoo asks the girl, who looks slightly startled to see him but nods in thanks, taking his hand before pulling him along to her younger brother, his face smudgy with tears.

"There was a bear," the boy says, "did you see the bear?" His eyes are a mixture of curiosity and fear, and Kyungsoo doesn't nod or shake his head as he leads them back to their parents.

Curiosity can be a dangerous thing, sometimes. You might start wanting things you can't have.

When he's older Kyungsoo gets a job in the grocery store, working the checkout after school. He watches all the people going by, and he can see all their darknesses sitting on their shoulders. He always has. The things that torment them, the bad things that are going to happen to them. Their deepest darkest secrets. He smiles at them though, and they smile back, just a little lighter for a moment. Kyungsoo feels a little heavier in return, just for a second, like breath of air gone wrong, water instead of oxygen, but their smiles are worth it. 

There's a young man though, Lu Han, who's strange. He doesn't have any darkness, but it doesn't seem like a good thing. The light around him is so bright to Kyungsoo, sometimes, that it feels dark. He frowns instead of smiling, the expression pulling his face in a strange way, as he doesn't say anything but rather focuses on ringing the items on the cart through. The young man seems to like the number seven, seven croissants one day, seven cookies another, and normally Kyungsoo would be a little curious, but not with him. Lu Han just nods as he takes his change, gathering up the flimsy handles of the white plastic bags before walking out into the light.

In the summertime, when there isn't school, Kyungsoo sells ice cream in an ice cream truck, going around the town dispensing happiness, the tinny music of the ancient speakers announcing his presence and drawing tiny pattering feet down the road, pouring out of houses and begging mothers and fathers for pocket money. The children come to him with their budding darknesses and he sells them ice cream and makes them smile. It feels good.

There's a boy, who visits the ice cream truck once. He hands up his money, and asks for vanilla, Kyungsoo has to lean down over the counter because the boy, a young man really, is in a wheelchair. As he reaches down, vanilla cone in hand, Kyungsoo can see such a swirling darkness around the young man, clinging to his skin and snaking out of his hair, and wrapping around his fingers, that he's shocked, inhaling slightly in surprise. He knows that his eyes are reflecting the darkness back at the boy, who looks up at him with wide terrified eyes, the ice cream slipping through his fingers and landing with a sad splat on the ground as the boy pries his gaze away and rolls off. Kyungsoo can almost hear his heart racing. The boy wasn't in a hospital gown, but there was a hospital I.D. bracelet fastened around his thin wrist. 

Kyungsoo wonders if he'll ever see him again. The ice cream cone melts on the sidewalk in an abandoned puddle, wheelchair tracks across the whiteness.

One time in the forest, walking home, he meets a boy, running away. It's dark, almost night, and there's a house just ahead, faintly visible through the trees. The boy, young man, has a cloud of pain radiating from his head and darkness on his heels.

He looks startled to see Kyungsoo in the shadows of the trees, the evening even dimmer under the thick cover of branches and leaves, and the whites of his eyes are showing as they dart back and forth, seeking escape.

"It's okay," Kyungsoo says, slowly, because the young man is like a wild animal, a hair's width away from being spooked. "Let me help you." He doesn't move, just waits for the young man to stop gasping for air. "I'm Kyungsoo."

"I'm Minseok," the young man finally says, the name scratching over his throat like it's a guilty secret. They sit for a while in the dimness, side by side on a fallen log, feet swinging gently through the gloom and ankles hitting the dead wood with dull thuds. Kyungsoo can see that Minseok's darkness isn't finished yet.

"Do you want to come with me?" Kyungsoo asks, because it's late and he should probably head home. Minseok looks at him for a moment, he looks so lost, his eyes so sad. Kyungsoo smiles at him, but it doesn't make a dent. Minseok nods.

Hand in hand, Kyungsoo leads Minseok home along the silent streets of the town, street lamps like fireflies in the dark, the traffic lights flashing crimson or amber, not a car in sight.

They're just turning the last corner, almost home, when Kyungsoo sees a pale flash out of the corner of one eye. He turns his head, eye meeting eye, the boy who asked for vanilla ice cream and let it slip out of his fingers. The shadows are darker now, almost swallowing him whole as another ice cream slips out of his hands like a sad joke, wheelchair tracks through more white, another broken childhood dream.

Minseok stays at Kyungsoo's house, sleeps in the spare room that used to belong to his grandmother, the walls empty now, the shelves bare, but Kyungsoo can feel that the story isn't over. He follows Minseok, quietly skirting the town, as Minseok steps silently through the streets and stands watch over the house by the forest. Shouting echoes from inside the blank walls, along with the dull sound of falling blows. Minseok winces, bites his bottom lip bloody, lies awake at night in the spare bed in Kyungsoo's house staring at the ceiling, as Kyungsoo lingers in the doorway and watches.

One night Kyungsoo wakes up to find Minseok missing. Quietly slipping into a jacket and shoes, he sets off in the dark for the house, because of course that's where he's gone. He won't have gone anywhere else.

The moon is only a thin crescent, almost new, and clouds block the stars as Kyungsoo steps up to the gate bordering the woods. Minseok is standing there, on the other side, but makes no move to open it. He's holding out his hands, and in the tiny sliver of the moon Kyungsoo can see that they're stained a red so deep it's almost black. Dirt under his fingernails.

"Did you kill her?" he asks, because the shouting voice was a woman's. Minseok looks up, unsurprised to see him this time. He nods, looks back at his hands. He can't seem to talk, but the darkness around him has fallen away as he stands there, almost glowing in the dim light.

Kyungsoo reaches out and opens the gate, which swings open silently on well-oiled hinges, as though in agreement. _Thank you._ Taking Minseok by the elbow, he guides him to a small babbling brook just hidden in a fold of the forest, the moon glowing dimly in the water. There's no reflection as Minseok dips his hands in and Kyungsoo washes them clean.

They go home then, through the woods, skirting the houses and streets of the town, so many silent sleepers, dreaming good dreams and bad dreams and everything in between. Kyungsoo wonders what they would think, if they would understand. He doesn't understand himself, but the shadows don't lie.

At home, he gives Minseok some of his spare clothes to wear, and puts his soiled clothing in the fireplace, lighting a fire even though it's too warm outside. The fire burns anyway, as they sit in the warm glow, and Kyungsoo takes Minseok's hand in the silence.

When the fire has burned completely to ashes, the sky growing dim with the coming promise of dawn, Kyungsoo puts his hand on Minseok's shoulder and guides him gently to bed, tucking him between the clean white sheets as outside, the sun peeks a sliver of gold over the horizon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was only slightly inspired by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's [Rumpelstiltskin](http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm055.html).
> 
> _I was originally supposed to cast a much darker light on Kyungsoo, at least from an outsider (Zitao's) perspective (contradictions are the best!), but with all the interactions it just didn't really seem to work. I'm sorry! I'll do better next time._


	6. Rattenfänger von Hameln {Minseok}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _You might hear the laughter of the children break and fade and die away as deeper and deeper into the lone green wood the stranger went, and the children followed._ [†](http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/hameln.html#newtown)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was written with Ed Sheeran's I See Fire ([Spotify](http://open.spotify.com/track/5pY3ovFxbvAg7reGZjJQSp) [YouTube](http://youtu.be/mllXxyHTzfg)) in mind.
> 
> _I'm not really doing individual warnings here but this story includes murder._

Minseok has always lived in a house by the forest. It's nice, a two storey house, butter yellow clapboard and roses on trellises—his mother's roses—even though he doesn't remember her. She's everywhere in the house, the paintings hanging on the walls, the recipe book in the kitchen, the crocheted doilies in the parlour. Minseok has never been lonely, even though his father is usually away on business, because his mother is everywhere.

His favourite spot isn't in the house though, but rather outside, under the juniper tree in the back garden, where he sits on a low wooden bench underneath the outstretched arms of a tree that looks like a life-sized bonsai, gnarled and knotted, the bark smooth under his fingertips.

Minseok looks up at the small crowns of green and smiles, under the sun. His mother is so close.

When he's older, though, his father gets married again.

"I'm worried about you," he says, on one of his rare stops at home. "You shouldn't have to grow up without a mother."

 _But I have a mother,_ Minseok wants to say, opening his mouth to explain—it's no good. His father is already gone.

His step-mother is tall and beautiful, and just a little scary in her perfection. Her eyes are too black, her mouth too red, her skin too smooth. It's nothing like the juniper tree in the back yard. _You will never be my mother,_ he thinks, watching her put away the doilies, take down the paintings, tuck the recipes into the attic shelves. He smiles at her anyway though, because that's what he knows he's supposed to do. She doesn't smile back, red-painted fingernails clicking on the hard surface of the table.

Minseok likes his new brother though. Yixing is all smiles, warm hugs, a bright voice chattering away to him about the birds in the forest, the cupcakes he saw in the patisserie window that looked so tempting, the song he wants to learn to play on the guitar. Minseok throws an arm over Yixing's shoulder and they sit under the juniper tree in the back garden, the blue forget-me-nots spilling out from the forest to dot the garden ground.

He's not sure when he first notices the bruises on Yixing's arms, tucked into his sleeves, or dotting the ridge of his clavicles, trickling down his spine. Minseok comes home early from soccer practice, one golden afternoon, the sun dipping low in the sky to send streaks of gamboge over the lawn, and hears the echo of shouting from the house.

His house. Suddenly it doesn't seem like his house at all.

Minseok bursts through the front door, almost colliding with the heavy wood in his rush to get through the obstruction, and finds his step-mother standing over Yixing, who's crouched on the ground, arms thrown up over his face. He can't even understand what she's shouting, the blood singing in his ears as he throws himself between her and Yixing as her raised fist falls.

It hurts, knuckles connecting with the bone of his cheek, stars spotting his vision as his head snaps back on his neck and he falls, blinking, his step-mother swimming in and out of view. She's looking at him, shocked, but the expression slowly turns into anger.

Minseok only realizes that Yixing is crying when she finally leaves.

"Why did you do that?" he asks, tucking himself around Minseok, resting his wet face on Minseok's shoulder. "Please don't do that."

"She's not allowed to hurt you," Minseok says, and that's that. He thinks about trying to tell his father, but he's afraid that his step-mother will leave and take Yixing with her. Big brothers are supposed to keep their little brothers safe.

It's strange though, how quickly the house that was a living, breathing incarnation of his mother so quickly becomes a darker kind of place. Minseok drops out of the soccer team, because it's too hard to hide the bruises, and signs Yixing up for guitar lessons instead. He's good at staying out of his step-mother's way, avoiding the things that make her angry, and watching for warning signs, like an extra glass of wine at dinner, or the sound her fingernails make when she taps them on the table in frustration.

He's stopped trying to figure out the why, and just lives with the because.

Sometimes it seems to make her even angrier when he doesn't cry, or groan, but Minseok doesn't want to flatter her, refuses to give in, even when it only makes her hit harder. Anything to keep her anger on him, and not spilling onto someone else. Yixing comes home early one day after school, but Minseok knows that she's in a mood, and sends him up to his room.

This time, when her fist comes down, he can't stand up right away, only lying on the hard wooden floor, fingertips buried in the rug that's still left from his mother. His step-mother exhales, a kind of bubbling rasp as her footsteps fade into the kitchen, the slam of the cabinet door as she searches for something to drink. Minseok lies there, dazed, and wonders if he can get up.

He does though, hearing Yixing's light tread descending the steps, and he's glad, in a way, that she hit him too hard because this way it was only once, and Yixing doesn't even have to know. He thinks it's gotten better, and Minseok only wants to see his little brother smile. He's sitting when Yixing peers around the corner, pretending to flip through a book of fairy tales even though his vision is too blurry to read the small black letters.

"Do you want to play outside?" Yixing asks tentatively, because even if he doesn't know something is wrong, his subconscious is too sensitive to miss anything. He knows what it's like.

"Sure," Minseok grins, hiding a stagger as everything goes black for a moment when he tries to stand. "Head rush," he explains to Yixing, who doesn't look quite convinced, but tosses him a soccer ball anyway.

"I know you haven't played in a while, but I thought it might be nice. . .?" Yixing's voice trails off in a hopeful question, and Minseok smiles at him, as they head outside.

But when Yixing kicks the ball, he's too slow, his senses still numb, and he doesn't manage to deflect, instead taking it full in the face. Everything really does go black this time.

Yixing is crying, when Minseok opens his eyes. "It's my fault," he sobs, "I'm so sorry." Minseok lifts a finger up wipe away his brother's tears.

"You didn't do anything," he reassures Yixing, but he can see this step-mother's face in the kitchen window, and his stomach flip flops because the expression on her face is more terrible than anything he's ever seen before. He realizes, with a strange shock to the stomach, that she's going to try to get rid of him. "You know I love you?"

Yixing nods, leaning against the wall, and Minseok ruffles his hair sadly.

He sneaks out under the cover of the new moon, the gate swinging shut behind him without a sound as he runs through the woods and tries not to cry, because he doesn't know what to do. Minseok's heart is pumping so loudly in his chest that he almost misses the boy, standing in the shadow of the trees, leaves sighing softly overhead. Minseok stumbles, slows, stops in front of the boy, a young man he can see upon closer inspection, weak moonlight trickling in from the sky.

"It's okay," the young man says, and he doesn't move, as though Minseok is a wild animal about to be spooked at any moment. It's true though, and the thought has Minseok torn between laughter and tears. He does neither.

"Let me help you," the stranger says, and MInseok wants to ask, _how?_ but he doesn't say anything as the young man continues. "I'm Kyungsoo."

They sit for a while, shoulder to shoulder on a fallen log, and when Kyungsoo asks if Minseok wants to go home with him, Minseok nods. _Yes_ , he doesn't have anywhere else to go anyway.

It's like a strange dream, one he can't wake up from, as Kyungsoo leads him home. It's not home, but his home isn't home anymore. Minseok thinks about Yixing, waking up to find his older brother gone. _I need to fix this._ It's not over.

Kyungsoo is kind, giving Minseok his spare room, sitting with him in silence and not asking any questions that Minseok isn't ready to answer. He goes at night, to the house by the forest, the house that isn't really a home, not anymore, and checks to make sure Yixing is still okay. _I'm sorry,_ Minseok thinks. _I'm sorry._

It's when he climbs the juniper tree to peer in the window, Yixing curled up under a thin sheet, and Minseok can see the puce dusting of a bruise spreading across his cheek—that's when Minseok finally decides.

She's not his mother, but there's still something wrong about walking through the dark, fingers balled up in fists, on the way to kill someone. Minseok pauses outside the door, looking at the spreading branches of the juniper tree.

_Please keep my brother safe._

The stairs don't creak in the thick silence of the dark, and Minseok pauses to whisper a wordless apology into the wood of his brother's door, before slipping into his step-mother's room. There's an ornate metal vase on the nightstand, something that used to belong to his mother. Minseok remembers tracing the smooth curves with his fingers as a child, pressing his forehead to the cool surface and imagining that his mother was stroking his cheek.

He lifts the vase with two hands, and lets it fall over his step-mother's head. Once, twice, three, times, four times. . .she twitches, nerves shivering, but doesn't wake up, her skull finally giving way with a dull crunch.

Wrapping the body up in the sheet, he manages to hoist it up and drags it down to the garden, where he digs a hole with a shovel from the garden and rolls his step-mother into it, setting the vase on top of the white shroud, along with the shovel, before he scoops the earth back into the empty space.

Pausing under the juniper tree, he leans his forehead for a moment against the smooth bark of the trunk. _Watch over my brother_ , he thinks, as wind rustles through the branches and a soft cascade of the scaly green leaves falls down like a soft blanket over the raw earth.

There are blue forget-me-nots shining by the back gate, but Minseok doesn't bend down to pick any. His hands are still red in the faint light of the crescent moon.

Some things you can never come home from.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is very loosely inspired by the folktales surrounding [The Pied Piper of Hameln](http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/hameln.html) and similar tales.
> 
> This story is continued in [chapter five](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4237428/chapters/9665013) and [chapter seven](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4237428/chapters/9665346).
> 
> _I've always been entranced by the idea of a stranger piping a tune and leading children away. Are they happy? Are they scared? Minseok is a lost child, and he follows Kyungsoo away. Sometimes there's no home to go back to._


	7. Von dem Machandelboom {Yixing}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"Oh, mother, I have knocked my brother's head off."_ — Marlene [†](http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm047.html)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was written with Gossip's Casualties of War ([Spotify](http://open.spotify.com/track/7MfbsOrUbCMbQhKyo9avqF) [YouTube](http://youtu.be/HiSQ-ZUVpoY)) in mind.

Yixing isn't allowed to think about the time before Minseok. It doesn't exist, a shapeless black hole that he's buried deep under his heart, smothered in the wet darkness of his chest. It never happened.

Minseok isn't his brother, only his step-brother, but there are things that are thicker than blood. Blood hurts, after all, his mother throwing him against the wall, a fine line of red trickling out of one ear as his head rings. Yixing doesn't think about it.

He doesn't.

Minseok is the one who noticed, Minseok is the one who opened the front door and threw himself under Her upraised arm. Minseok is the one who took the blow.

Yixing doesn't have a mother. He only has a brother.

Minseok sits beside him under the juniper tree in the backyard, smiles as he talks about the songs he wants to play on the guitar, his fingers waving music trails through the air. Minseok always talks to him from the left, because Yixing's right ear doesn't hear as well anymore, not since— _it doesn't matter. Not anymore._

But there's a price for everything, and Minseok pays for Yixing's clear skin, unblemished by puce and green bruises, by a necklace of his own, Her fingerprints on his collarbone, his neck, spots dotting his arms. Yixing knows that Minseok doesn't play soccer anymore, and the thought hurts, like thinking about never being able to play the guitar anymore.

"It's okay," Minseok says, and smiles, hiding a wince as the back of his hand accidentally grazes a particularly angry looking bruise on his right thigh. _It isn't okay._ But Yixing doesn't know what to do. He didn't before, and he still doesn't now.

"It's okay," Minseok says, and smiles up at him from where he's sitting on the armchair in the parlour. Yixing knows it isn't, but he has a soccer ball and he wants Minseok to be happy. _I love you,_ he doesn't say, because he doesn't know how, but he smiles at his older brother as they walk out into the late-afternoon sun.

Minseok grins as they kick the ball back and forth, and for a moment Yixing can pretend that everything is okay. The sun is shining and Minseok has a soccer ball again and he can't see any bruises, though he knows there are secrets hidden under the folds of his brother's loose shirt.

And then he kicks the soccer ball, which flies in a gentle arc over the grass, dappled in the light filtering through the leaves of the trees leaning over the back garden, and Minseok misses. He's just standing there, blinking, as the ball connects with his head, and everything goes silent, even the birds stop singing in the woods as his slight body crumples to the ground in an extended string of time, every tiny motion utterly, painfully clear. Yixing tilts forward, feet pushing through the air like molasses, strings of seconds tearing his skin backwards as he doesn't make it in time to catch his brother as he falls.

Yixing gathers his brother in his arms, trying not to cry but he can't help it. He loves Minseok so much but Minseok only gets hurt because of him. His tears are dropping on Minseok's face, rolling off the sharp jut of his jaw, when Minseok's eyes flutter open. His gaze is a little hazy, uncertain, but he smiles up at his brother and Yixing feels like his heart is shattering in his chest.

"It's my fault," Yixing sobs, "I'm so sorry." He's not talking about the soccer ball, or rather that too, but mostly just everything. _I'm sorry for coming into your life._

"You didn't do anything," Minseok says, and his fingers lift, ever so slowly, to wipe away Yixing's tears. It only makes it hurt more, but he just nods. "You know I love you," Minseok says, and Yixing wishes he didn't.

When he wakes up in the morning, Minseok is gone, and Yixing knows it's all his fault.

"You're a terrible person," She says over the breakfast table, her voice casual, red-lacquered fingernails tapping a disjointed dance across the wooden surface. Yixing stands up, pushing his chair across the tiles with a grating scratch, and leaves. He knows it will only make Her angry but he doesn't care.

When he comes home She's not back yet, and Yixing slips up to his room and jams a chair under the doorknob. It won't keep her out forever, but it's a start.

Yixing spends his time waiting, trying to do work on his music, but his stomach is all twisted in sick anticipation of something he can't predict, so he ends up sitting by the window instead, looking out at the house next door. It's his aunt's house, Her sister. Yixing doesn't know her very well, because he's never had time to think about things like that, but his aunt looks like Her and that's enough to turn his blood cold.

It's a strange house, quiet, and Yixing watches through his window as he waits for Her to come home. His two cousins, Jongdae and Joy, don't seem to be at home, but his step-cousin Yifan is washing the dishes. Yixing can see him through the kitchen window.

He wonders where his aunt is, and if she hurts her children too.

Yixing is dozing off, face slumped against the window glass, when a shudder runs through the framework of the house as the front door slams. He starts up, eyes flickering across the yard as he realizes that She's home. Jongdae is just walking up the path to the front door of the house next door, and Yixing looks at his pinched, sad face. _You hurt too,_ he thinks, as the doorknob to his room turns.

He manages to fall asleep, not in his own room, but rather in Minseok's, curled up under the thin sheet, the juniper waving green branches in the dusty dark. His arm doesn't hurt too much, and his dreams are only flickers of sadness, his brother's face, peering in the window. Yixing wakes up with tears on his face. _Please come back_ , he doesn't think, because he wants Minseok to live.

Yixing spends a lot of time in his room, watching the house next door as he listens for Her. Joy slips out early, comes home late, but she's smiling and looks happy. Yixing watches Jongdae instead, the shadows under his eyes, the way his feet drag across the sidewalk. And Yifan doesn't leave the house and garden, pulling weeds in the flower beds, hanging laundry over the line hoisted on metal poles in the back yard, crisp white sheets like wings. There aren't any stains, but Yixing knows how bleach works.

When he's sure She won't be back for a long time, because She wore a nice dress or took her laptop with her, Yixing creeps down to the garden and sits under the juniper tree, but it feels wrong without Minseok. There's no one to talk to, and gradually he just grows quieter and quieter.

"Hi," a voice says, across the fence, and Yixing looks up to see Jongdae peering over the wooden slats.

"Hi," he replies. They don't say much, but Yixing sees Jongdae every so often, and one time Jongdae looks so sad that Yixing wants to try to make him feel better, like Minseok used to make him feel safe.

"Are you okay?" he asks, because he doesn't want to mention mothers and hands that bruise. He's never seen any bruises, but that doesn't mean much, the tender spots under his clothes remind him all too well.

Jongdae looks at him, across the fence, and there's a silence before he opens his mouth.

"What are you supposed to do if someone's hurting themselves but they don't believe it?" He leaves then, disappearing into the dim recesses of his house, and Yixing tries to figure out what he meant. All he can think is Yifan. _Is Jongdae trying to tell me that his mother is hurting Yifan?_

Yixing watches more closely, and forgets to prop his chair under his doorknob, so that the first blow hits him without warning. Afterwards, when he sees Yifan through the window, sitting across from Yixing's aunt under the glow of the dining room chandelier, smiling before she stands up, Yixing winces, expecting violence. He doesn't understand when she only wraps her arms around his back, whispering something into Yifan's ear that Yixing can't hear as Yifan smiles, the golden glow of the light suffusing his face. Curled up on the window seat, Yixing turns away, closing the curtain behind him. 

His stomach feels sick.

His dreams are restless, that night, and he can hear footsteps in his feet, blows falling as he winces, even in his dreams, the heavy wet sound of limp things being dragged across the floor, bumping down the steps. Yixing tosses and turns, and tears his sheets off the bed, tangling his legs in a twisted mess so that when he wakes up, landing on the floor with a dull thud, he can't move for a panicked moment, fingers clawing desperately through the fabric because he's afraid the sound has woken Her. But there's no sound from the hallway, and when Yixing has finally extricated himself from the shroud-like fabric and peered out into the corridor, he realizes why.

Her door is open and she's not there. Her bed is empty, though the sheets are rumpled, her slippers waiting for cold feet to slide into them in the morning. It's still night.

There's no real reason, but Yixing makes Her bed anyway, smoothing the sheets over the mattress, pulling up the coverlet in a silky plain of fabric, and with every brush of his hands it feels like he's erasing Her existence. The slippers he tucks into the wardrobe, and it's like she never existed at all.

When he goes down to the kitchen, he can see through the window that the juniper tree has dropped a shower of leaves in the night, the bench is covered in a green cushion and the earth as well.

In the morning, Yixing goes out to the garden. Yifan is there, hanging sheets over the line, white wings whispering flight.

"Why don't you leave?" Yixing asks, because he still doesn't understand. Yifan pauses, his arms a bundle of white fabric, and looks confused.

"The thing I'm most afraid of," he says, "is the people I love leaving me." He smiles then, back at the house, and Yixing can see his aunt's face in the window.

 _My brother already left me,_ Yixing thinks as he walks quietly back into the darkness of his house. _I don't care about Her at all. I'm just glad she's gone._ The branches of the juniper tree wave in the wind as the door closes behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was loosely inspired by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's [The Juniper Tree](http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm047.html).
> 
> _This is definitely one of my favourite fairy tales of all time. I wrote a modificiation of it for Spanish class (cheers for university-sanctioned fanfiction!) and it lurks in my head, popping up in various guises and metaphors. Because how can you get something like this out of your head?_
> 
> My mother, she killed me,   
>  My father, he ate me,   
>  My sister Marlene,   
>  Gathered all my bones,   
>  Tied them in a silken scarf,   
>  Laid them beneath the juniper tree,   
>  Tweet, tweet, what a beautiful bird am I.


	8. Snedronningen {Junmyeon}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"Now you must have no more kisses, or I should kiss you to death.”_ — the Snow Queen [†](http://hca.gilead.org.il/snow_que.html)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was written with Sia's Breathe Me ([Spotify](http://open.spotify.com/track/6hrgeEo1WQOHVeF8QMv68S) [YouTube](http://youtu.be/ghPcYqn0p4Y)) in mind.

Junmyeon remembers going under.

It wasn't all at once, not like sitting at the bottom of the ocean, all waters of the seven seas pouring over his head to press him gently, _violently_ down to the bottom. Rather, it was like swallowing the sea, sip by sip until his belly was full, sand and rocks and sea creatures tenderly pulling him under, watching the light disappear as the surface faded into the distance and the cool dimness of silence surrounded him.

Junmyeon didn't wake up one morning and decide not to get out of bed. He woke and dressed and ate breakfast, a little more slowly, his hands moving through the air like through water, drops of milk falling from his spoon, taking just a second too long to fall, as he opened his mouth. It was a slow unravelling, putting his homework off later and later, not doing it at all, not combing his hair or brushing his teeth or putting things away, his life lying scattered around the confines of his bedroom, four walls holding in an existence that was shrinking back into himself, as he sat on his bed and looked at all the things and couldn't remember them ever belonging to him.

It was cold.

People didn't talk to him in the hallway anymore, maybe it was because he never looked up, never smiled, never looked their way, seconds drifting like snowflakes through the air, his mouth frozen in silence. People spoke, teachers, parents across the dinner table, the blurred face of someone who was his brother. Junmyeon blinked, pale eyelashes like hoarfrost.

He didn't get out of bed.

Eventually, the voices stopped throwing themselves at him, sound waves spinning in slow motion through the sticky air. Junmyeon lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, like the surface of an ocean he couldn't breach.

He's still staring at the ceiling, as the leaves send waves of green swimming in shadows across the white paint of his bedroom wall, ocean tides that come and go with the sun, as the moon comes out again and he drifts across the sea floor, toes sliding over sand as he slips into the bathtub, his skin drinking up the cold water that numbs his fingers.

Junmyeon doesn't wonder if he'll ever reach the surface, if the sea will ever thaw and spit him out. He only stares at the ceiling, icicles forming on the white plaster, blades of winter growing gently downward, drop by drop until they reach his skin and impale his flesh on their icy spears.

He wonders if it will hurt.

A boy drops in through his window one day. A young man, smile like a cheshire cat. Alice, before winter, and the red queen.

"I'm Jongdae," the young man says, and Junmyeon blinks. He doesn't say anything, and Jongdae looks at him curiously. "I guess this isn't my friend's house." Junmyeon just lies there, and waits for Jongdae to climb out through the window again, which he does, fingers skidding along the wood windowsill and cursing when his skin gets a splinter.

Sometimes there are thorns, hidden in the snow.

Jongdae comes back though, through the bedroom door this time, and Junmyeon wonders who let him in. Or rather, he would wonder, but this thoughts are suspended today, spun outwards in webs of ice, each question a single six-sided snowflake building slowly in the higher reaches of the atmosphere.

Jongdae asks him questions that Junmyeon doesn't answer, the words piling up like blocks of snow, tendrils of icy vines, thorns on Junmyeon's hedges against the night, against the ocean that swallows him whole.

Jongdae talks about a world outside the window, outside the ocean in Junmyeon's room, outside the ice covering the surfaces of his existence, and Junmyeon blinks and doesn't say anything.

Sometimes he wonders, staring up at the ceiling at night, leaves rustling outside like a creeping tide, the light of the moon pale and watery through the glass, if Jongdae is lonely, but he's not sure what that is anymore. There's only the ocean, water in his lungs and his fingers like icicles dripping over his sheets.

When Jongdae isn't there, he doesn't exist.

"Will you ever talk to me?" Jongdae asks, and he sounds sad. Junmyeon just stares at the ceiling, and listens to the soft whisper of Jongdae's bare feet as they walk out the door, swinging silently shut behind him. Branches scrape the glass of his window, cold air blowing in as clouds roll in and it begins to rain.

"Come outside with me," Jongdae says, standing in the middle of the floor, an expression on his face that Junmyeon can't decipher. Junmyeon watches the air leaving Jongdae's nostrils which flare slightly, his shoulders lifting gently with each inhalation, the almost invisible gust of wind as he breathes out, the breath freezing white in the chill of his room.

"Can you say my name?" Jongdae asks, sadness tucked into the corners of his mouth, tiny pools with dead fish, small piles of rocks marking the undertow that catches unsuspecting swimmers by the ankles, pulling them under to drown. Junmyeon doesn't open his mouth, he doesn't know where his voice is. There's a goodbye in the slope of Jongdae's back, as the thorns curling at the edge of Junmyeon's vision creep forward and hide him from view.

Jongdae leaves, and he doesn't come back. The ocean swallows him whole. Junmyeon lies on his bed, blank eyes looking at the ceiling, and doesn't think about anything at all. The water in the bathtub at night forms ice on the surface, and he almost forgets to climb out, his lips blue in the light of the moon as he stands in front of the bathroom mirror and doesn't see anyone at all.

Icy thorns cover the window, block the door. Junmyeon lies in bed and breathes water.

And then, somehow, there's a rustling, and a face peers in through the hedge outside his window, the vines brown and green, not coated in ice, where the stranger touches.

"I'm Yura," she says, and her voice is loud, smooth, seashells washed soft by the ocean but still solid. "We're going to be friends!" She sounds excited, and Junmyeon idly wonders why people come in through his window. He looks up at the ceiling again, but her face is in the way, vivid blue eyes shining, a bright ocean on a visit to the beach. Something starts to melt, and Junmyeon pulls his ocean close.

She comes back the next day, and tells him all about her summer volunteer project, making new friends in the neighbourhood or something. Her words fall in a cascade, tropical waterfalls that sweep him under and pull him back out again as she waves her fingers in the air, the fingernails flashing pink and green today, blue and yellow tomorrow. Narrow metal bracelets sparkle on her slender wrists as she darts around the room, picking up the things that haven't been his for such a long time.

"Oh, I like this!" Yura exclaims, holding up a glass ball, snow tumbling about inside like a winter storm. There's a boy standing in the drifts, the white flakes obscuring his expression, his hands empty, until a tiny apple drifts down to fall into his palm. Yura hands the sphere to Junmyeon and keeps tidying, as he sits in bed and watches the snowflakes swirl through the water.

Yura doesn't seem to mind that he doesn't say anything at all, and at night, sometimes, he looks at the ceiling, tracing invisible constellations that he can see, almost peering out of the surface of the ocean, and wonders what she wants.

The thought burns, somehow, and tingles in his fingers. The icicles above his bed start to melt, water dripping in his face until he blinks in frustration and sits by the window instead, the glass cool when it touches his cheek.

The glass of the window is warm. Junmyeon has fallen asleep leaning against the window, and the sun is shining now, tiny beads of sweat dotting his forehead at the uncomfortable warmth. He blinks, Yura is standing in his bedroom doorway, holding a bag of something he doesn't know.

She sits with him on the bed, kneeling on the mattress behind him as she styles his hair, brushes and combs and a hair pomade that smells like green apples. Junmyeon can't remember the last time he ate green apples. Unconsciously, he runs a tongue over his lips, and jumps when Yura laughs.

"It really smells too good," she says, grinning, and the next time she comes she brings two apples in a brown paper bag. Junmyeon watches her take a bite, the sound of the crunch, feet walking over fresh snow, tiny drops of juice beading on her lip as she chews. He looks at his own apple, skin smooth and green in his hand, and lowers his mouth to take a bite.

The taste is almost overwhelming, sweet and crisp and sour and so many things he can't explain, the flavours triggering memories he's forgotten. There are tiny tears pooling in the corners of his eyes as he chews, the texture of the apple softening between his teeth until he can swallow the sweetness down, let it fill his stomach with something other than snow.

After Yura leaves, taking the crinkly brown paper bag with her, Junmyeon stands in the middle of his room and stares at the closed door behind her.

If the slight stranger with the cheshire grin, the one Junmyeon can't quite remember, his shadow tangled in the icy thorns, was only a part of the waves, another castaway lost at sea and fighting for the shore, Yura is the sun, peering over the hedge.

Junmyeon sits by the window, looking at the real stars this time, not the invisible ones on his ceiling, and thinks about green apples, crunching between his teeth, the sweetness on his tongue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was loosely inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's [The Snow Queen](http://hca.gilead.org.il/snow_que.html).
> 
> This story is continued in [chapter nine](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4237428/chapters/9665424).
> 
> _This is another fairy tale from my childhood (okay I'll admit I grew up on the gritty stuff) and I remember the themes being recalled in various places such as C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as well as most recently in Frozen. Frozen had a nice take on the matter, examining the Snow Queen's motives etc., but I always liked the good old age gap romance in the original, and this was supposed to look like that from the outside but of course it didn't end up anything like it. Is Junmyeon the Snow Queen? Is he Kay/Kai? Is he both? You decide, and I'll revisit this again._


	9. Hänsel und Gretel {Chanyeol}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"How could I bring myself to abandon my own children alone in the woods? Wild animals would soon come and tear them to pieces."_ — the poor woodcutter [†](http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm015.html)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was written with Kodaline's One Day ([Spotify](http://open.spotify.com/track/41Tfjvjuw8s61okfqPOV1Z) [YouTube](http://youtu.be/LE7KVkm_YFU)) in mind.

When he was young, his family went camping in the forest at the edge of town, and Chanyeol remembers getting lost.

He didn't get lost on purpose; no one does. Not when they're still scared of the dark, even taking a nightlight to summer camp and secretly crying into the tear-dampened pillow at night. One minute they were going hiking, his dad's long-legged strides devouring the hiking path, his mother darting along beside, speeding up in the pursuit of an elusive wild bird or the flash of colour that might be a particularly gorgeous specimen of wild flower, before stopping and dropping to a crouch as she snapped photographs. The next minute, Chanyeol was wandering in the woods, lost, trying to head for his big sister's voice calling his name.

Chanyeol still doesn't like bears, a residual reaction to an experience he still dreams about.

He'd been trudging along, sweat beading on his upper lip and pooling in the dips of his elbows, eyes hazily skimming the underbrush as he thought about supper that night, sausage and shish-kebabs over an open fire, with smores as the triumphant dessert finale, when his gaze snagged on something that shouldn't have been there. Something white, and moving.

_A polar bear?_

Chanyeol's thoughts hadn't even caught up with his body by the time he realized he was crashing through the woods in the pursuit of something that obviously couldn't be real. There were no polar bears in the woods, not here. Brown bears, perhaps, and the occasional grizzly, to be avoided at all costs, but polar bears? Never.

His memory didn't seem to agree with him, eyes flicking over the foliage, catching on white spots that only turned out to be small white pebbles, or the dapples of light trickling through the forest canopy.

By the time Chanyeol realized he was lost it was too late; he was standing in a small clearing, eyes frantically searching the shadows of the woods, his sister's voice ringing in his ears as he tried to figure out in which direction to run. In the end, paralyzed by indecision, she ended up coming to him instead, stumbling across his clearing in a happy accident, before a sudden rustling behind them resulted in the emergence of a boy, around their age, who led them back to the path.

Chanyeol held onto Yura's hand the whole way, even when they were reunited with their parents, the strange boy waving a brief goodbye before he disappeared back into the trees without even leaving his name.

Chanyeol keeps holding Yura's hand, even when she stops being quite so understanding about it.

"You're not lost," she tells her brother, gently but firmly prying his grasp open, but she doesn't understand. No one does.

When Yura has to go to school, and Chanyeol to kindergarten, he starts crying as soon as she waves goodbye from the door and doesn't stop until she picks him up again at the end of the day. His teacher is frustrated because Chanyeol means it, just a slow, sustained sobbing that continues throughout the day.

"There's something wrong with your son," she tells his parents at the parent-teacher conference, and Chanyeol has to go to see a therapist every day after school, who glares at him over her half-moon glasses, though she does end up being the cause of the cessation of Chanyeol's outwardly visible dependency on his older sister, not because it's true, but because his therapist shows him, indirectly at least, that if he hides it, people won't get in his way.

Chanyeol is the perfect little brother after that, and if he's a little too nice, a little too cheerful, well that's still so much better than crying, right?

Yura goes off to get her post-graduate, at a university that's too far for commuting, and Chanyeol grudgingly makes friends, with a new kid who has just moved in down the road. Jongdae is nice, a smile like a cheshire cat, and makes a perfect disguise, too busy in his own secret, sad little world. Chanyeol follows him one day and watches him climb into a neighbour's window. It's a little odd, but he doesn't care.

Chanyeol just wants to be around Yura anyway, and if she's in a cheerful mood, which is most of the time she's on holidays, she'll paint his nails and tell him everything she's thinking. Chanyeol doesn't understand all of it, but it doesn't matter. He just needs to be around her as much as he can.

So when Jongdae stops sneaking off to wherever he has always been disappearing to, Chanyeol isn't very happy. Jongdae's supposed to be the easy-going friend with the cheshire grin, not the moping and drawn young man he's become, and Chanyeol isn't interested. He tells Jongdae he's busy, whenever the latter calls, and slowly the messages taper off to silence.

Chanyeol's more concerned about Yura's sudden volunteer project, which takes her away from the house every day for long stretches, from which she returns, smiling, and goes off to her room. Chanyeol doesn't know if she's writing reports or chatting on her phone with friends he doesn't know and is secretly jealous of, but he can't find out because he's been banned from entering her room ever since his parents caught him sneaking in at midnight to sleep under her bed as a child.

Chanyeol doesn't regret it, he just regrets getting caught.

It's harder to follow Yura because she's more sensitive to it; it's not the first time he's tried to follow her and she's had too much practice detecting a trail. One time he manages to follow her as far as the town square, only to have her double back so quickly that he ducks down a side road towards a random vending machine, _ice cream_ his brain barely registers as his eyes flick over the display and he stuffs a coin in the slot. After that he waits, pretending to be completely uninterested in her daytime activities. Chanyeol even goes so far as to pretend to sign up for a book club at the library, and gradually her guard comes down, until one day he manages to trail her to the same house that Jongdae used to visit.

Chanyeol isn't curious, not really. He's jealous.

When Yura comes home he sneaks back out, creeping out his window and down the sturdy boughs of the old oak tree in the backyard before skirting the fences of the neighbourhood to reach the house with the window. It's far too easy to climb the tree next to the house and peer in.

There's a boy, a young man actually, lying on the bed, hands crossed over his chest like a corpse. He doesn't move, his chest barely rising and falling as he stares at the ceiling, eyes open. It's creepy, and Chanyeol feels chills running up and down his spine. The air in the room is strange, even though the window is open to the summer night; there's a kind of stillness, a chill not so much in temperature but rather in feeling.

Looking through the open window, Chanyeol feels like he's looking into a different dimension. He's still shivering as he hurries back through town to climb back in his window, tucking his hands into the warmth between his knees as he curls up in bed and thinks.

"Are you almost done your volunteer project?" he asks, over the breakfast table, playing with his spoon and accidentally splattering milk over the wooden surface as it slips out of his fingers, landing with a metallic clunk on the tile floor. His mother sighs from the sink, and reaches for the paper towels as Yura makes a face, wiping milk splatters off her arm.

"It's a summer thing," she says, and grins, despite the soggy paper towels that are sitting in a heap at the edge of the table. Yura doesn't hold grudges. Chanyeol almost dislikes her for it, sometimes, but when she smiles at him everything is okay.

Everything is not okay. Chanyeol corners Jongdae at the library, asks him about the boy he used to visit, and Jongdae won't say anything at all. But when Chanyeol does a little more research, he finds out that Junmyeon is a virtual recluse, that one day he just didn't get out of bed and no one has seen him since. That would be fine, it really would, Yura could have her feel-good summer volunteer meet-the-neighbourhood whatever project she has, and then she would go back to her post-graduate degree and everything would be forgotten. Except Chanyeol is sitting by the front picture window, pretending to read a book but actually surreptitiously watching for Yura to come back so he can ambush her in happy delight at her return, maybe even convince her to go out for ice cream or slurpees, when he sees something that makes him ball his fists in his lap. It feels like there are small white stones clattering around his lungs; they grate when he takes a breath, and they feel icy cold.

Yura is walking with someone, a person Chanyeol doesn't recognize at first, but when Chanyeol blinks and looks closer, nose pressed to the glass, he feels something like acid swim up his throat.

It's Junmyeon. The boy who never leaves his house. For a frozen corpse, he looks all too alive, even though he's pale in the bright sunlight, large sunglasses shading his eyes from the glare so that Chanyeol can't make out his expression. Yura isn't touching him, and Chanyeol shudders at the thought, but she's turned toward him, arms gesturing in animated sweeps and she looks so _alive_ —his stomach twists as he closes his eyes, something dark planting a seed.

When Chanyeol steps outside a few moments later, Yura and the boy are gone. Chanyeol won't even think his name. _You stole her from me,_ he thinks, and even though it's an overreaction, the thought rings true.

He walks aimlessly along the street, under the shifting shade of the trees that line the sidewalk, fists balled up in his shirt as he tries not to think about anything at all, almost stumbling over a boy sitting on the curb.

Chanyeol is just about to open his mouth to mutter an apology when the boy's eyes meet his. There's a darkness there, and a question that he doesn't have the answer to.

"Hi," the boy says, and the shapes of his words are sharp, crushing the stones in Chanyeol's lungs. "I'm Baekhyun."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was loosely inspired by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's [Hansel and Gretel](http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm015.html).
> 
> This story is continued in [chapter ten](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4237428/chapters/9665448).
> 
> _Chanyeol was originally envisioned in the role of telling Junmyeon's story from the point of view of a jealous outsider, but in overlapping with other characters, I feel like his story got a lot more interesting._


	10. Kong Lindorm {Baekhyun}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"And when all his skins are off, you must dip the whips in the lye and whip him; next, you must wash him in the fresh milk; and, lastly, you must take him and hold him in your arms, if it’s only for one moment."_ — the witch-woman [†](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30973/30973-h/30973-h.htm#PRINCE_LINDWORM)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was written with Simon Curtis' Flesh ([Spotify](http://open.spotify.com/track/0kW7NQraFEyAhXqaE4cZG0) [YouTube](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEfKooMunLI)) in mind.

Baekhyun has always known he's not like most of the other children.

It's not that there's anything wrong with him, though sometimes he feels like it, but rather something else. A need, for something he can't explain. It's frustrating, confusing, and as he grows older it only gets more difficult for him to understand. There are things he likes that he's not supposed to like, at least that's what it seems like from the other children, as he watches them play at recess, crying when they fall, running to the teacher with skinned knees and grazed knuckles.

One time, Baekhyun is climbing the ropes when he accidentally slips, the rope burning his skin on the way down. The skin of his palm is red, irritated, but he just slips his hand into his pocket, blinking once or twice as the fabric of his shorts brushes the surface. The sensation stays with him all day.

Even at five years old, he knows that he's not supposed to feel that way.

Baekhyun knows he frightens his parents sometimes, a lot of the time, but he can't help the feeling of wrongness that floods his body at times, like his body doesn't belong to him but is rather something else fighting with him, limbs that stretch too far away from his body, skin that stretches too tightly over bones. He wants to turn off his head but he doesn't know how, all the things he's supposed to think about, manage, control, swimming around in his head until he feels like he's going to explode.

For a while he tries dance, and it's cathartic to be able to pour the strangeness into motion, forcing his muscles forward, the controlled tension and flow of positions. But Baekhyun gets greedy, it's his fault really, he knows. Watching the older dancers, the way they bind their feet into pointe shoes, the way they pretend not to wince, sometimes, when they take them off again. . .Baekhyun gets jealous and does something he's not supposed to. When he gets caught, Boa, the dance instructor, sends him home. He knows that it's not really about the shoes though, or that's only a part of it. Dancing should be for the sake of dance, but Baekhyun has always had different reasons.

He can't dance anymore, not officially anyway, but he keeps an eye on the dancers anyway. There's a younger boy, Jongin, and something about him calls to Baekhyun. It's not the same thing, not at all, but if life is slowly destroying Baekhyun, he can see that dance is gradually destroying Jongin. The difference is that Baekhyun knows that he's spinning out of control, and Jongin is blind to anything but the motions.

He keeps an eye on Jongin after that, like watching to see whether a parallel trajectory will begin to diverge.

Baekhyun's first boyfriend, when he's a first year in high school, is Changmin, home from university for the holidays. He likes Changmin, likes his sharp tongue and smart remarks, the way he pokes and throws friendly punches and isn't afraid to roughhouse.

The first time they have sex is in the backseat of Changmin's parents' car, pulled into a clearing in the forest, and Baekhyun feels a little. . .disappointed, but Changmin kisses him afterwards and whispers that it was the best thing ever and Baekhyun nods and smiles and pretends. Changmin is surprisingly nice.

Changmin is too nice. Baekhyun doesn't grow bored, exactly, but it's infuriating, the way Changmin doesn't go hard enough, fast enough, there's a frustration building in his chest that he doesn't know how to control and it's going to overflow.

It does, one evening, in a scorching fireworks display of shouting as Baekhyun tries and fails to explain what he wants. Changmin, he finally understands, doesn't want to understand, and there's an undercurrent of fear in his eyes as he shuts the door of the car and drives away. Baekhyun lies on his bed afterwards, bedroom door shut and curtains drawn, muffling his screams with his pillow.

Baekhyun goes to Jongin's dance performances instead, alone, as the days turn into months and years, watching the way his muscles strain as he flows across the stage, the tiny winces he hides even from himself. It's not enough, but it's something. There's pain on Jongin's face, but he's not enjoying it the way Baekhyun would be. Jongin is living the dance. It's different, and yet in so many ways it's entirely the same; Baekhyun can feel himself spiralling downward and he knows that unless someone can stop Jongin, the same thing will eventually happen to him.

He meets Chanyeol, one summer, a boy he remembers from high school, always smiling, a little too bright, too cheerful, and Baekhyun could always see beneath the mask. Chanyeol is nice, Chanyeol is friendly, Chanyeol has a kind of twisted darkness, walking up to him along the road, fists balled up in the fabric of his shirt. Sitting on the curb, Baekhyun wonders if Chanyeol will be able to hurt him the way he needs him to. The darkness in Chanyeol's eyes seems to say _yes_.

The answer is no. 

There might be a darkness in Chanyeol, but it's a small, pale shadow, a blip in the sunshine that Chanyeol doesn't seem to be able to see. He isn't interested in Baekhyun at all, not really; Baekhyun is just a distraction from a larger flaw in Chanyeol's character.

Baekhyun goes out on dates with Chanyeol and watches his boyfriend's eyes wander aimlessly, searching for someone who isn't there. He's always far too happy to be going home, dropping Baekhyun off at his house with a cheery grin as he waves and drives away. The one time that Baekhyun tries to kiss him, Chanyeol looks startled, leaning back and blinking for a moment. Baekhyun can almost see the gears whirring in his head— _right. . .kissing. . ._ —he leans back in, pressing his lips to Baekhyun's mouth, but the twisting red in Baekhyun's chest has cooled and he only goes through the actions, flesh sliding over flesh like limp rubber, deflated balloons after the party is over and everyone has gone home, the birthday boy alone, surrounded by material objects and silence.

He doesn't kiss Chanyeol again and Chanyeol doesn't ask. His skin is hot to the touch, but the warmth doesn't transfer to Baekhyun's skin, only a deeper cold. Chanyeol doesn't love anyone because he only wants to love someone else.

They're sitting in the car in the parking lot, windows open to the hot summer night, the engine off as they sit in the harsh brightness of a floodlight. It's a dance performance, Baekhyun mentioned that he had a thing for Jongin and Chanyeol just nodded and bought tickets. It feels like a slap in the face, but Baekhyun doesn't say anything. Sitting in the car, side by side yet separated by the gear box, it feels like they've never been further apart. Chanyeol clears his throat.

 _Is this the end?_ Baekhyun wonders, and the thought doesn't feel like anything at all.

"I'm sorry," Chanyeol says, and his face is wrinkled slightly, the line of his usually upturned lips curving down into a frown, "I know you like Jongin but he got injured so someone else is dancing instead." He looks at Baekhyun, and there's an anxious nervousness humming in his eyes. Baekhyun waits for something else, anything else, but that's it.

 _That's all I am to you,_ Baekhyun thinks, it's not logical but it makes sense. Jongin has finally broken, stretching too far, flying too close to the sun and he's falling now, burnt cinders to crash into the cold, hard ground. _Am I finally allowed to break?_

His mouth is open before he realizes it, the words have been waiting for so long, coiled under his tongue, tucked into the dark corners of his mouth. "Hit me."

The words fall like stones into the heavy air, which only thickens further and traps them, suspended in the space between them.

 _Hit me, hit me, hit me_ , Baekhyun's heart is pounding and the blood is racing in his veins, his fingers balling into fists, fingernails cutting into the soft palms of his hands. Chanyeol is just staring at him in the stark illumination of the floodlight, the shadows cutting his face in two. He's looking at Baekhyun like he doesn't know him at all, and all of a sudden Baekhyun is so frustrated, so angry, filled with a helpless rage that doesn't have an escape channel—

"Hit me," he says, and feels like throwing up. He knows Chanyeol isn't going to do it.

"Think about your sister, abandoning you for that recluse in the silent house, throwing her arms around him, resting her head on his shoulder, pressing her mouth to his—" Baekhyun jumps a little as Chanyeol's fist slams into the car door, the entire chassis vibrating as the anger builds in his eyes as he breathes in and out and in and out and. . .fades into a kind of sad loneliness as his fists unfurl, limp hands lying face up, open on his thighs, fingers letting go of something he can't keep, something that was never his to begin with.

Chanyeol is just a little misguided, a kid who got lost and is taking a while to find himself again. Baekhyun realizes, with a crystallized acuteness, that Chanyeol will never give him what he needs, what he thinks he wants, as the anger twists in his chest sours, curdles, sharpens into a cutting despair, spirals of self-hate that coil around his throat, as Baekhyun can't stand it anymore. He wants to crawl out of his skin, he wants to peel it off, tear off his flesh and pull apart his bones, anything to get rid of this terrible awful pressure as he fumbles with the door handle, almost falling out of the car as he stumbles onto the still-warm asphalt of the parking lot, shuts the door on Chanyeol's words that only buzz like sulphur lights in the dark and don't coalesce into meaning.

There's a girl standing in the parking lot, her eyes lock onto Baekhyun's as he straightens, and he's pretty sure she heard everything through the open window. She's dressed up, wearing nice heels and holding a small bag and it looks like she's going to the performance. Baekhyun doesn't care. He walks straight up to her and asks, 

"Would you hit me if I asked?" He's breathing heavily, trying not to fall, but the ground is numbing beneath his feet. _She's going to turn away._

But the girl only looks at him for a moment, her face half bright in the floodlights, half dark. "Are you asking?"

Baekhyun blinks, swallows, the saliva almost choking him. "Yes," he says, and his harsh whisper splits the night, louder than a scream.

She stands there, still, looking at him intently, and Baekhyun just feels reckless, completely out of control. _Will she hit me if I pretend to hit her first?_ He's about to lift his arm, he doesn't care anymore about anything at all—her shoulders straighten, just a little bit, and her eyes get deeper, somehow, warmer—she opens her mouth.

"Do you want me to help you?" she asks, and there's something about her voice. It's a question—she's not telling him to do anything and yet he absolutely wants her to tell him what to do. Baekhyun feels himself exhaling, leaning against a car, the metal warm to his skin. His arm catches on a small sharp edge of metal, it's an old car and rusted, the metal digging into his skin and suddenly he can breathe just a little bit better. She looks at him, not sharply and yet she seems to know exactly what he's feeling. Baekhyun somehow wants her to know.

"If you want me to help you," she says, "wait for me on the sidewalk outside your house tomorrow." She looks at him, a complete look, as though she's seeing the entire him, the entire chaos of dark and light that makes up Baekhyun, before she turns and walks away. He doesn't even wonder how she knows where he lives. _I've seen her before._ But he can't remember where.

Baekhyun stays standing there, leaning against the car. He misses the concert, but it doesn't matter, Jongin isn't there anyway, and Baekhyun finds he doesn't care about Jongin at all. He already broke. _He already got what I want._ Gradually, he lets himself slide down to his knees, there's a rock digging into his left shin and it feels good. It feels like breathing. He stays like that, thinking about the girl, there's something familiar about her— _home_ —the word appears and fades again as he's not thinking about anything at all. People start leaving the concert hall. Baekhyun walks home quietly in the dark, limping slightly, because his legs are entirely pins and needles and there's definitely going to be a bruise from the rock digging into his shin. It feels good. Not good enough, but good anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was loosely inspired by the Norse folk tale [Prince Lindworm](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30973/30973-h/30973-h.htm#PRINCE_LINDWORM) (here translated by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Engebretsen Moe).
> 
> This story is continued in [chapter eleven](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4237428/chapters/9665484).
> 
> _I only stumbled across this story recently, thanks to the[gorgeous illustrations](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30973/30973-h/30973-h.htm#linki_13) by Kay Nielsen, but this story drew me in right away. Obviously an inspiration for stories such as C.S. Lewis' The Silver Chair (also a childhood favourite!) this story brings to mind such interesting, generally modern concepts, and I couldn't resist applying them._


	11. La Belle au bois dormant {Jongdae}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _. . .they could not penetrate the hedge. It was as if the thorns were firmly attached to hands. The princes became stuck in them, and they died miserably._ — [†](http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0410.html#grimm)
> 
>   _I'm not really doing individual warnings but this story has some platonic bdsm themes off camera._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was written with Placebo's A Million Little Pieces [Spotify](http://open.spotify.com/track/19pQaJUSEtn31fpO6RozaH) [YouTube](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0YP9aJ_1TQ)) in mind.

Jongdae can't really remember his dad. Even before he died, _was it an accident?_ he doesn't even remember, because they don't talk about it at the dinner table. His dad was never around anyway, a table for four with three chairs filled, the other chair pushed against the wall, books and papers piled on top, all the drip and drabs and odds and ends that get swept off the wooden surface of the table so that it can be set for meals. That's all his dad ever was, another obscure memory, slips of paper that no one needs, tucked into a pile that only gets higher and higher, coffins stacked in wall slots, bodies on pull-out drawers in morgues, the unidentified being sent, nameless John and Jane Does, to become learning material for someone else.

He's a little excited when his mother remarries, not so much excited as. . .tentatively expectant. Maybe this can be a good thing, a step in the right direction. He gets a new brother too, an older brother for him and Joy, his younger sister, who doesn't remember their father at all, no _maybe_ in question. Yifan is quiet, clinging to his own father, and Jongdae feels a tinge of something that isn't exactly jealously. _Regret._

But they're getting used to each other, three and two at the table to make five, an extra chair pulled up, friendly elbows and the cheerful clatter of knives and forks, Yifan tucking his long legs under his chair except when he forgets, a knee slipping free to bump someone else's under the table; he apologizes then, awkward, Joy reaching across the table to pat his hand and everyone grinning in the golden light of the chandelier.

And then Jongdae's step-father dies. There's an accident, driving home in the rain on the highway, aquaplaning tires and a steering wheel being yanked too hard to the side and now Jongdae's standing at another graveside, with an extra person crying in the hushed stillness of late afternoon, as the sky holds its breath.

There are four people at the supper table now, the extra chair gone, a family glued together by a common grief that doesn't make it any easier to bear. Jongdae's mother sinks into a depression, not the quiet kind but rather sharp words on her tongue as she begins to tear herself apart, the other three sides of the table caught in the crossfire. But even when she's saying things she doesn't mean, Jongdae can see the tears in her eyes as she pushes her chair back from the table, the legs scraping over the kitchen floor with a dull groan before she disappears from sight.

Joy stays out later and later, talks to people Jongdae doesn't know, and Yifan shrinks into himself. Jongdae feels like the house, once so cheerful and vibrant, is collapsing into itself. He understands his mother's grief, he understands Yifan, but that doesn't make them any easier to bear.

Even his recent friend, Chanyeol from the neighbourhood, doesn't help. When Jongdae can't take it any more, one afternoon, his mother exploding into a bout of shouting at the table before stomping up to her room to cry into her pillow, Yifan quietly dropping tears into the dishwater as he distracts himself with dishes, Joy not even at home, Jongdae slips out and tries to crash in on his friend unannounced, but he gets it wrong. The person lying in bed isn't Chanyeol, but as he looks at the young man, Jongdae realizes he doesn't care.

He goes in by the front door the next time, tangling thoughts in his head as he tries to think of pretexts to explain himself, but the woman at the door lets him in at once and points him up the stairs. Over the next couple of weeks Jongdae realizes why.

Junmyeon—he gets the name from Junmyeon's mother, never from Junmyeon himself, who doesn't say anything at all—is frozen in the confines of his room, drawing, suspended in some kind of stasis that nothing Jongdae does seems to be able to break through, the hedges only growing thicker, darker, more thorn-encrusted, as Jongdae falls in fascination, if not something more, with the strange young man who looks like nothing so much as a lost boy, the perpetual snow falling in the depths of his eyes never filling the gaping ocean of his expression.

Jongdae falls in something but Junmyeon doesn't even let his mouth fall open, and Jongdae finally realizes that maybe some people can't be fixed, or maybe, and the thought hurts, they're just waiting for someone else.

"What are you supposed to do if someone's hurting themselves but they don't believe it?" he tells the boy on the other side of the fence, the cousin he doesn't really know, even though they live next door. Yixing's face closes up at the thought, the way he looks at Jongdae with dark eyes that look like bruises on his pale face, scaring him a little as he turns away.

When he tells Joy—sitting out on the porch in the dimness of dusk, the evening star shining on the horizon as she comes up the front walk, gate swinging shut behind her—she looks at him for a while in the growing dark. Her face is shadowed and he can't make out her expression.

"Some people just aren't the right fit,' she says, " and some people shouldn't fit but they do." Stretching her arms over her head and sighing, a comfortable sound as Jongdae hears the faint click of her back realigning itself, she throws a comment over her shoulder before the screen closes behind her.

"Watch Mom and Yifan for a while." She's gone before he can ask the questions bubbling over his tongue.

Jongdae doesn't understand what she's getting at, but he tries. And once he actually looks, little things piece together to shape a whole that he doesn't quite know what to do with, but it's not bad? Just. . .he never would have noticed, if Joy hadn't said anything.

The way Yifan's finger trails over the back of her hand as he clears the plates. The way the corner of her mouth lifts in a small smile. When Jongdae creeps down the steps for a glass of water, because his throat is dry and he can't sleep, tossing and turning and dreaming of winter, he sees his mother sitting at the table, papers spread out over the surface, Yifan sitting beside her as he rests his head on her shoulder.

There's a sad lump in Jongdae's throat as he creeps back up the stairs and drinks from the faucet in the bathroom instead, even though the water has a metallic aftertaste, like blood in the back of his throat.

"I met someone," Joy announces at breakfast the next day.

"Who is it, honey?" their mom asks, and Yifan glances over, but Joy just smiles and shakes her head, spoon scraping the bottom of the cereal bowl. Jongdae follows her to the kitchen, his spoon and empty bowl in hand, as they stand side by side at the sink and wash their breakfast dishes.

"It's your ex's sister's brother's ex," Joy says, turning to look at him for a moment before she puts her bowl and spoon to drip on the drying rack. Jongdae doesn't understand.

He follows her, and he's not even sure why, except that he's restless, somehow, the air too thick, the house too silent. The sound the window makes, blowing through the juniper tree next door sets his teeth on edge.

Joy walks down the street, making a couple turns at corners, Jongdae barely even trying to hide his presence as he follows her from the shadows of the trees that line the road. He doesn't know what to expect, he's not even really thinking anything at all.

There's a boy sitting on the curb, outside a tall house, shadows peering out of the windows. It feels too big for the street, even though it's the same size as the other houses, and the boy feels the same. He's not a boy, not really, maybe the same age as Jongdae. There's something _wrong_ about him; his eyes are too bright, in a way that's dark, and his skin seems too thin, stretched too tightly over his body, angles and edges. His finger twitches, flicking against his wrist in an uneven beat as he looks up at Joy who looks. . .concerned.

Jongdae can't remember her ever looking that way. He waits, drifting under the edge of the tree cover, watching Joy crouch down to the young man's level, his eyes meeting hers then darting away before returning, as she says things that Jongdae can't hear. The young man nods, a sharp motion that seems to send shivers through the heavy air. It feels like there's going to be a storm, clouds hanging low in the sky. Joy stands, watching the boy slowly unfold himself as though he's been sitting, hunched up, on the curb for a long time. _Maybe I should leave._ He's just about to move, feet angling back home, when Joy looks up, catching him with her gaze.

"This is Baekhyun," she says, and there's a weight to her words that Jongdae doesn't understand. It's not just a simple greeting. "Say hi."

"Hi," Jongdae says awkwardly, but Baekhyun only tilts his head and looks at him for a moment.

"Come to lunch," he says, turning and walking away before Jongdae has a chance to reply. He doesn't really want to, but Joy beckons and Jongdae feels he has to follow.

The house is. . .strange. The atmosphere is heavy, and the decor isn't exactly welcoming, katanas and gleaming fencing swords, a swan mounted over the mantelpiece in the foyer, wings spread as if about to take off, an ornately braided whip coiled on a plaque on the wall, shelves and shelves of heavy leather tomes. It's gorgeous, but oppressive.

Baekhyun's parents are strange too. It's just the five of them, because Baekhyun's brother is apparently away at summer camp, or so Baekhyun's mom says as his dad brings in the lunch on a silver rolling cart. Jongdae doesn't understand why no one asks any questions, and both of Baekhyun's parents are looking at him as though they're scared of him. When Baekhyun's mother's finger accidentally brushed the skin of his hand, ladling out the soup from the porcelain tureen, she winces slightly, hot soup splattering on the skin of her arm, but she doesn't say anything, just pausing to wipe away the liquid with a napkin before she continues. _They're not scared of Baekhyun,_ the thought slips into Jongdae's mind, _they look like they're scared of hurting him._

It's obvious now, the terrible concern in their eyes, the way their gazes follow him as he spoons soup into his mouth, barely blowing at the hot liquid to cool it before it slips scorchingly down his throat. They don't know how to react around him at all, and Jongdae feels like a fifth wheel, unable to contribute or even affect the situation at all, just a stranger at a table sipping soup he's not even tasting as it slides down his throat.

Baekhyun pushes his chair away and leaves before dessert, his parents wincing at the sound as they look at each other with wide eyes; they obviously don't know whether they should follow him or not. The mood in the house is stifling, like there's no air. There's really something awfully wrong with Baekhyun and no one seems to know what it is, as a bolt of lightning splits the sky outside, the sharp white light casting the room is a sharp divide of light and shadow before thunder echoes and the heavens open with pouring rain.

No one, it is, except Joy. They're all startled when she pushes back her chair, scraping over the floor, and follows him. There's the sound of a door closing in the hallway, muffled by the rain, then silence, punctuated by the occasional peal of thunder, lightning flashing more often as the storm draws near.

Sitting there, in the flickering lights, Jongdae doesn't know what to say to Baekhyun's parents, who have no idea what to do, a few strangers grouped around a table in the middle of a storm that unleashes its fury at the world outside the thin glass windows. They sit there, silent, waiting for something Jongdae doesn't know as the ice in their glasses melts, the soup cools and the sauce congeals in the serving bowls.

There are footsteps, then, emerging out of the sound of the rain hammering on the roof; Joy appears in the arch the hallway, walks through the dining room and onwards into the foyer, returning a few moments later with the whip that Jongdae recognizes as being the one from the wall, as she disappears into the dimness of the corridor again, muffled once more by the rain as a door opens and shuts.

The three people at the table are speechless. The storm rages on.

Lightning cracks through the air, the smell of ozone, a fine mist of rain as a window blows open with the gusts of wind from the storm. The dining room is a flying tumble of napkins, splashes of water and soup, glasses knocked over and cutlery siding to the floor, as Baekhyun's parents move, as if in a daze, to close the window and mop up the water, Jongdae slipping into the hallway, where the smell of the storm is even thicker.

He pressed an ear to the door, and can't hear anything through the heavy wood. Lightning flashes again, from a recessed window up ahead, thunder splitting the air like a whip, a sharp crack through the air, and he can hear a sob.

_What is going on?_

Thunder rumbles through the house again, another crack of lightning, another sob that sounds like it's coming from the very bottom of someone's chest, pulled out by the roots. Jongdae looks back down the corridor, where Baekhyun's parents are still slowly putting the dining room back together, their eyes only flicking towards where he's standing outside the door. He knows they heard it too.

And then the loudest explosion of thunder overhead, a massive crack as lighting hits the lightning rods on the roof, the whole house buzzing, and the sob though the door isn't a cry at all but a scream, that goes on and breaks apart into heart-wrenching sobs.

Jongdae has his hand on the doorknob, the metal turning beneath his fingers even before his mind has a chance to catch up, when he hears his sister's voice.

"Stop," she says, not loudly, but Jongdae knows she means it. He's never heard her like that before, like it's something that really matters. He stops.

The sobbing trails off, Jongdae peering through the keyhole of the door but he can't see anything, just the shadow of leaves against the wall, a painting hanging in a frame of a disgusting dark horrible worm, and Jongdae doesn't understand how anyone can sleep in a room with that.

"You can come in," Joy says.

Jongdae pushes the door open. Baekhyun is curled up in Joy's lap, on the floor, not quite sleeping, just. . .completely calm and boneless as he's draped there.

There are three red lines across his back, standing out against the skin, but Baekhyun doesn't look upset, not even a little bit. Rather he looks. . .so incredibly relaxed and happy and the air is light, clean, as the rain tapers off outside, the storm passed overhead and gone, the choking atmosphere dissipated into a watery blue sky and a hint of a rainbow over the forest.

Jongdae looks at Baekhyun and feels. . .jealous. Jealous, not because he wants to be Baekhyun, not because he wants any of the things the Baekhyun seems to want, need, but because, curled up in Joy's lap, he looks like he trusts Jongdae's sister so completely that it almost makes Jongdae feel lost.

He wishes he had someone like that.

Jongdae turns quietly in the hall, murmurs a muted thanks to Baekhyun's parents for the lunch—they look confused, maybe even a little scared, but there's something else lurking in the corners of their eyes and it looks like hope. Jongdae closes the front door quietly behind him and goes home, under the pale blue sky, the air washed clean by the rain.

When he opens the front gate, Yifan is reading a book on the porch, the swing drifting back and forth gently in the breeze as he flips pages. He's smiling too, looking up when he hears the gate click shut again.

"Hi," he says. "I was just going to pick flowers in the forest, when the rain stopped. Do you want to come?" 

Jongdae nods, and follows his stepbrother around the house and into the cool green shadow of the woods.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was loosely inspired by the [Sleeping Beauty](http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0410.html) group of fairy tales.
> 
> This story is continued by [chapter eight](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4237428/chapters/9665367) and [chapter twelve](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4237428/chapters/9665517).
> 
> _Do you even think about the princes who didn't make it? What ever happened to them?_


	12. Cenerentola {Yifan}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"Her stepmother-to-be was a woman of keen feeling [. . .] And she, too, had known grief."_ — Fairy Godmother [†](http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=cinderella-2015)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was written with Annie Lennox's Love Song for a Vampire ([Spotify](http://open.spotify.com/track/586ebYARm6m2wTjUYfnt16) [YouTube](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhG8zC4npsE)) in mind.

Yifan remembers being happy as a child. It wasn't hard, going on long walks with his mom and dad in the forest behind their house, picking flowers and making his mom smile. She had a nice smile, like the sun, dappled light on the path as the leaves shifted, the wind creeping through the forest canopy overhead.

She's smiling in the coffin too, before the undertaker closes the lid, but it isn't the same, even when Yifan tucks a cluster of forget-me-nots under her cold, stiff fingers.

The house is quiet afterwards, hushed, as Yifan and his father tiptoe around a hole in the fabric of their life. The forget-me-nots fade, drying to blue crumbles of dust that dissolve into the air, fragments to be swept up by the long bristles of the broom and disposed of.

Yifan walks in the woods, alone now, though he doesn't feel alone, after a while. Sometimes there are flickers, a rustling deeper in the trees, flashes of white and Yifan imagines his mother, dancing between the trees on fleet bare feet, flowers in her hair. He can't see her, not really, but the thought makes him feel a little better, makes him smile.

It hurts, losing the ones you love, but Yifan thinks he can maybe bear it, and when his father gets married again, after a while, Yifan is happy that the house won't be empty again.

It's strange, to have different people in the house, strangers really, but know they're family. Yifan believes strongly in family, in people sitting around the table, eating together, the happy sound of chewing and conversation. He can't get used to his step-mother though.

Not because she isn't a perfectly nice person, though she's completely different from his mother, and maybe that's the problem. Ziyi is not his mother, and he just can't call her that.

"You can just call me Ziyi, if that feels better," she says, leaning against the door frame of the kitchen as Yifan washes the dishes, enjoying the happy feeling of turning dirty things clean. His father, by the refrigerator, putting away the leftovers, shakes his head but he's smiling.

Yifan likes his step-siblings, Jongdae and Joy, even though he doesn't really know much about them. Joy is honest, direct, she has things she likes and other things she doesn't, and though she hurts his feelings sometimes she isn't mean and usually apologizes. Yifan is okay with that.

Jongdae is quieter, somehow, even though he's loud at the supper table, his smile like a cheshire cat as he makes jokes and plays tricks. There's just a quietness inside him, a kind of waiting for something, though Yifan isn't sure what it is.

He's not waiting for anything, except maybe his father to come home from business trips; he's always anxious when he's away for too long. Deep down inside, hidden in the secret folds of his heart, Yifan is terrified of losing anyone else.

It happens anyway, and there's another coffin closing over a face he won't see again. He can't even cry, the tears so choked and tangled up inside that he just goes home and buries himself in piles of dishes. As soon as he's done he just starts over again, until his hands are dry and the detergent bottle is empty.

They eat toast and cereal for supper and no one is hungry. Joy drops a glob of jam on the tablecloth and suddenly Ziyi is shouting, not even words exactly, and they all look at her in shock as she doesn't break down into tears, just turns and leaves the room.

Yifan understands the feeling; he'd like to cry but there aren't any tears.

Joy doesn't spend much time at home after that, but Yifan understands her small smiles as he hands her sandwiches, ruffles her dark hair as she heads out the door again. The house doesn't feel right anymore, off-kilter, like one of the legs is missing even though there are four people sitting around the table, when Joy is there.

There's something wrong with Jongdae too; Yifan doesn't know what it is but his step-brother leaves the house with a hopeful expression on his face in the mornings, and comes back crushed, sneaking up to his room, his soft footsteps on the stairs as Yifan dips his hands in the dishwater.

And Ziyi doesn't say anything, or shouts at things that aren't really problems, when Yifan can see that she doesn't care about the insignificant issues at all, her fingers digging into the skin of her arm, leaving dull bruises, as she stomps up the stairs and lets her bedroom door fall shut behind her.

One time, when he's going up to his own room for a recipe book from his mother, her smile still somehow lingering between the pages, he hears a sound, and pressing his head gently to Ziyi's bedroom door, he can hear her crying, thick, choking sobs that are gone from sight when she comes down to breakfast the next morning.

Yifan wonders what her story is. Who her first husband was. Jongdae and Joy never talk about their father at all.

He starts taking tea up to her, when she works at her computer, and one day he calls her down for lunch, just the two of them at the kitchen counter. It's strange, sitting side by side and Yifan realizes that he's so much taller than she is, even if she seems so much bigger.

Her arm, reaching for the salad, delicate wrist flashing pale as she picks up the tongs and transfers a portion of lettuce onto her plate, catches his eye. She's too thin, and it makes him sad. Ziyi might not be his mother, but he doesn't want to lose anybody anymore.

Yifan goes for a walk in the forest again; he hasn't been since his father died, the thought of walking the same paths too lonely, too painful, even though his father hasn't been out here since his mother died, but the memories are still thick on the ground, imbued into the green of the leaves overhead. There's a flicker again, white flashing in the distance, and Yifan smiles. His own personal ghost. He should pick flowers for Ziyi, like he did for her mother.

She looks up at him, puzzled, when he brings a small handful of forget-me-nots in a pale porcelain vase to leave on her desk, but she's not upset so Yifan takes it as a good sign. She's shouting less, her irrational lashing out at minor upsets happening less and less, and there's a kind of quiet stillness around the supper table that isn't quite happiness, but could be.

Ziyi smiles, now, when Yifan brings her flowers, forget-me-nots from the forest and once a small cluster of pink azaleas from his mother's garden.

"You're sweet," she says, and Yifan smiles back, the faintest tracing of pink dusting her face, which only makes her laugh. He hasn't heard her laugh since his father died. The sound is so happy that he excuses himself, slipping into his bedroom so he can shut the door behind him and cry, finally, thankfully, into his pillow.

It doesn't make any sense, but it feels like it's going to be okay. Ziyi can laugh, they talk again, sometimes, around the supper table, Yifan takes baskets of white sheets to hang out in the backyard and watches them flapping like wings as he clips them to the line. No one is going anyway. He can cry, now.

Ziyi spreads her papers over the dinner table at night, after supper is over and the dishes cleared, and Yifan brings tea as they sit across from each other, her with her papers and him with his book, and one time she even gives him a hug before she goes up to bed.

"Thank you," she whispers in his ear, and Yifan smiles.

The boy next door, Ziyi's nephew, a step-cousin he doesn't really know, asks him why he doesn't just leave, and Yifan looks at him and doesn't understand what he's talking about.

"The thing I'm most afraid of," Yifan replies, after a while, "is the people I love leaving me." He catches a flicker in his peripheral vision and, glancing back, he can see Ziyi in the window, beckoning him inside, a smile on her face.

_But they won't, not anymore._

Ziyi passes him a book, and when Yifan looks at the cover, he can see her name on it.

"You wrote this?" he asks, surprised, and she just nods and grins and everything feels so okay that he feels like crying. He reads the book in one sitting, gulping the words down, and later, when it's dark and everyone has gone to bed, he sits at the table next to her, as she looks through papers and charts that Yifan understands now are plots and ideas, watching the stories spin under his fingers until his head is nodding and drifts down to rest on her shoulder. She doesn't push him away.

It rains the next day; Ziyi is working upstairs at her computer and after making her a cup of tea, Yifan goes out to sit on the porch swing, rereading her book as he waits for the storm to pass so he can go out to the forest and pick more flowers. The forget-me-nots are drooping a little and there might even be violets.

The rain had just tapered off, leaving a blue-washed sky and the trailing hint of a rainbow overhead, as he sees Jongdae come through the gate.

He looks lost, and Yifan frowns, trying to think of what he can do.

"Hi," he says. "I was just going to pick flowers in the forest, when the rain stopped. Do you want to come?" Jongdae looks up, and gives a small nod, so Yifan sets the book down on the swing where it won't get wet, even if it starts raining again, and leads Jongdae around to the back garden and through the gate that opens out onto the forest.

The air is fresh, sweet after the rain, the greens and browns lush and vibrant as Yifan spots forget-me-nots but keeps walking. Just behind him, Jongdae's footsteps are hushed, his eyes peering out into the richness of the woods. He's not smiling, not yet, but he seems more calm, less coiled with sadness, and Yifan feels a little relieved, grinning when he catches sight of some violets up ahead and ducks under a branch to reach them.

His relief is short lived though when, glancing behind with a handful of violets to show Jongdae, he realizes that Jongdae isn't there.

"Jongdae?" he calls. "Jongdae?" But there's no answer, only the thick green of the forest permeating the air, and suddenly the vibrant lushness feels more like a trap. There's a flicker up ahead, white, and Yifan thinks about his mother.

 _Please help me find him._ He can't bear to lose anyone else.

It's not his mother, though, when Yifan darts around a clump of trees, vines hanging low, and finally sees the white thing that he's been spotting, but never actually finding, in the forest for years.

It's a huge white polar bear, half sitting on the ground, and Jongdae is curled up in its arms. Yifan is so scared he freezes for a moment, raking his mind for something, anything—and then he realizes that Jongdae's ankle is bruised, like he took a bad fall, and the bear is holding it up tenderly off the ground, supporting his step-brother's weight. Yifan blinks. It doesn't make any sense.

A polar bear in the forest doesn't make any sense. Yifan thinks about all the times he saw flashes of white in the woods, all the times the polar bear could have hurt him but didn't. Breathing out a sigh, his shoulders slumping slightly, he sinks down onto a fallen log, the surface wet as it soaks into his pants, the forgotten violets crushed in his hand, and locks eyes with the bear, who only looks back at him with eyes that seem to be speaking.

 _Thank you,_ the bear seems to be saying, _for understanding_. Curled up in its arms, Jongdae stirs, but doesn't look up as he nestles further into the white fur, only wincing slightly as his leg shifts. Yifan knows that they have to go to the doctor in a bit to get it looked at, but right now, just for while, they sit in the forest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was loosely inspired by the [Cinderella](http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0510a.html) group of fairy tales.
> 
> _I went to see the new (2015) film adaptation of Cinderella, and was struck by the step-mother—what is her story? This ended up being a very "watered down" version of a thought experiment I'd like to write later, adapted here for this interwoven connection of stories, but basically, the whole dynamic betwen Cinderella and the Lady Tremaine was utterly fascinating to me, and there was a key scene when the Lady Tremaine left the party to find her new husband, and found him with Cinderella—the abandonment in her expression sparked a cascade of ideas that could not be ignored._


	13. Østenfor sol og vestenfor måne {Sehun}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _". . .I am a White Bear by day, and a Man by night.”_ — the Bear [†](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30973/30973-h/30973-h.htm#EAST_OF_THE_SUN_AND_WEST_OF_THE_MOON)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was written with Elsa & Emilie's Endless Optimism ([Spotify](http://open.spotify.com/track/4GAASor2AiPvM3Wl05dkKf) [YouTube](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsQDVW70Nzk)) in mind.

As far as he can remember, Sehun has always had his particular problem. It's not a bad thing, not really, but. . .sometimes Sehun just wishes he'd been born like anyone else. His parents only treat it like a minor inconvenience; they hardly mention it, like a small health issue, hay fever or allergies. Sehun can't imagine what it would have been like if they'd made a big deal out of it, and he loves his parents enormously, he really does.

But he still wishes he wasn't a bear.

He's not a bear all time, maybe if that was the case things would be easier. He'd just be a bear, and that would be that. But the way things stand, Sehun turns into a bear when the sun rises, and into a boy when the sun sets. Bears are pretty easy going, but it's people who want things, an endless appetite for knowledge and experiences and things.

Sehun wants to go to school, like the children in the books he reads after the sun sets, because his bear paws aren't very good at flipping pages, but children go to school during the day and bears don't. He thinks it's unfair, and runs away to the edge of town to watch the children in their little jackets and backpacks heading for school, but when he forgets himself and accidentally creeps too close, not hidden enough in the green cover of the trees, a child about his age sees him and cries out, whether in surprise or fear Sehun isn't sure as he shrinks back, crashing through the forest and loosing his footing on a green slope, tumbling over and down to land with a crash next to a bubbling brook. He feels so sad, somehow. _I want to play with the other children,_ he thinks, and large polar bear tears drop into the water skipping by on the rocks, as he splashes his paws in the stream so he can't see his expression.

"Are you okay?" a voice asks, from somewhere above him. Sehun looks up in surprise and spots a boy, perhaps a year older than him, perched in the elbow of a tree.

"I'm Kyungsoo," the boy says, and waves as he lets himself slip off the branch and darts forward to pat Sehun on the head. "Don't cry." He heads past Sehun, up the slope, calling back over his shoulder, "I'm going to be late for school if I don't go now, but I'll see you later!" It's not a question, and Sehun finds himself smiling, shaking the leaves out of his fur and washing his tear-streaked face in the brook before heading home.

Sehun sits lessons with his parents instead, who warn him not to go too close to town again; he'd complain but he can see how concerned they are and he remembers the child's scream and nods. He doesn't tell them about Kyungsoo though, reasoning with himself that the strange boy hadn't seemed scared and that it was probably okay.

He sits lessons at night under the light of the golden lamps, the stars sparkling outside in the night sky, but during the day he's allowed to do whatever he pleases and he mostly is pleased to romp in the woods, sometimes with Kyungsoo, showing him the ins and outs of the forest, and sometimes alone, slipping between the trees and pretending to be the quiet mice in his picture books, even though he's a lot bigger than that, especially as he hits his growth spurts and keeps growing.

There's another boy who wanders in the forest, at first with parents but then alone, picking flowers as he wanders along the forest path. Sehun doesn't reveal himself, flitting along the path, hidden in the the shadows of the leaves, but he thinks the boy knows he's there. He smiles in Sehun's direction anyway, not frightened of the gentle rustling in the underbrush, and it feels like walking with a friend, even if they don't ever meet. Sehun wonders what would happen if he said hello, but he doesn't quite dare. He's terrified that if he scares the boy, he'll never come back, and it's better walking together like this than being alone.

It's a quiet day in the woods, the birds singing lazily overhead, when he spots a family hiking in the forest; the parents he's not very interested in but the children look like they would be fun to play with, yet Sehun remembers his parents' warning and keeps to the cover of the thicker underbrush, rustling along almost silently, something he's been getting better at doing.

Except he's not good enough, apparently, because the boy spots him somehow through the underbrush and darts off in his direction. At first it's like a game of tag through the woods, and Sehun is so happy, for once in his life he's getting to play with someone else—he gets to play with Kyungsoo too of course but this is different—his heart is pounding in his chest, the air rushing through his lungs and he feels so alive.

Until he realizes that he's not a boy, he's a bear, at least right now, and bears are far too fast for small boys to keep pace with. By the time he finds the boy again, slipping quietly through the trees, he's standing alone in a clearing, crying. Sehun realizes that he's lost. He can hear the girl, a little ways away, and circles around the clearing to lead her in the right direction, as she calls out for her brother.

"Chanyeol? Chanyeol?" Sehun darts just out of sight, white flashing through the trees as she follows the sound of his feet, breaking into the clearing to spot her brother, crouched on the ground, crying.

"Yura," he whimpers, looking up, and she enfolds him in her arms and wraps him in a warm hug. Fading away between the leaves, Sehun feels a little sad. He wants to give someone a hug like that too.

He goes and finds Kyungsoo instead, leading him to the children.

"Thanks," Kyungsoo says, patting Sehun on the nose before stepping out into the clearing to lead the startled children back to the path. Sehun watches them fade away into the trees, as he trundles back home and tucks himself into a hollow to sleep his sadness away.

At least Kyungsoo stays, even as they both get older, Kyungsoo stretching up to a young man, not very tall, while Sehun's human form gets taller and taller, and his polar bear body becomes massive. It's frustrating, sometimes, navigating the tighter underbrush of some of the thickets, even if this is his forest, the one where he's lived all his life. He's a polar bear, and he should be running along the open expanses of the Arctic, snow and tundra, not weaving around trees and getting twigs tangled in his fur—but this is his home.

But even Kyungsoo isn't forever. He works often now, during the day, mingling with the crowds of children and adults that Sehun smells on him when he has time to slip into the forest.

"Where do you go at night?" Kyungsoo asks, and Sehun shakes his head because he can't answer, and he isn't quite sure if he wants to, but the months pass and Kyungsoo gets busier and busier and Sehun is afraid of losing him.

It's strange navigating the woods at night, as a human, all his senses are duller and the distances are all wrong for two legs; it's almost scary, being the in the woods at night, but Sehun presses on. He didn't slip out of lessons just to turn back because he's scared.

He spots Kyungsoo at the edge of woods, just walking, and he's about to dart forward and surprise his friend—Sehun swallows the thought, _what if he just likes me because I'm a bear?_ —when he sees another young man standing in the woods. He smells like pain, and even as a human Sehun can sense some of the things his bear shape picks up.

The young man smells scary, and Sehun stays frozen in the shadows as Kyungsoo slowly approaches the boy, eventually leading him to sit on a fallen log as Sehun waits behind a tree, not daring to approach. Kyungsoo is one matter. A complete stranger, one who smells so wrong. . .Sehun is too scared for that. He watches sadly as Kyungsoo leads the stranger away.

"Where were you?" his father asks, when Sehun turns up, and Sehun has never been happier to be able to turn into a bear and avoid answering the questions he doesn't want to think about right now.

He sneaks out several times after that, getting better at going through the woods at night as a human, even as the moon wanes and he borrows his mother's flashlight from the hook by the door.

The stranger keeps going back to where Sehun first saw him, to the house at the edge of the forest, the house that smells so wrong that as a bear Sehun won't go anywhere near it. It's better, as a human, but only marginally, and he can't understand why the stranger keeps going back, or why Kyungsoo follows him.

 _Are you still my friend?_ he doesn't ask Kyungsoo, because Kyungsoo is too busy to go for walks in the forest during the day right now it seems, and at night he's too busy following the stranger.

Sehun wants to say something, doesn't want to let his friend slip through his fingers, but it feels like it's too late and he's already lost.

The last day he slips out of lessons, there's a thick, sweet smell coming from the house and, creeping gingerly up to the fence, Sehun sees the stranger burying something under the juniper tree in the back garden.

It smells like death.

Sehun escapes back into the safety of the trees and doesn't look back, wondering sadly, as his clothes catch in the twigs of the underbrush, leaves swatting him in face as the thin sliver of moon above barely lights the way, his body mainly functioning on muscle memory, whether he'll find another friend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was loosely inspired by the Norse folktale [East of the Sun and West of the Moon](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30973/30973-h/30973-h.htm#EAST_OF_THE_SUN_AND_WEST_OF_THE_MOON) (here collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Engebretsen Moe).
> 
> This story is continued in [chapter twelve](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4237428/chapters/9665517).
> 
> _I remember reading this story as a child and watching a film adaptation we borrowed from the public library; I've always found this older version much more fascinating than the Beauty and the Beast, though these themes keep coming up again and again; the manhwa[Bride of the Water God](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bride_of_the_Water_God) being a particularly tantalizing example. But no one ever seems to explore the idea—what if the beast is just a beast? Is that a problem? Or in the example of the Norse version, what's wrong with having a bear and a man for a husband?_

**Author's Note:**

> I hope I haven't traumatized anyone too much with these stories, and thanks for reading!
> 
> Do check out [the sequel](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3937396) to chapter two if you're interested.


End file.
